Visualization needs and techniques for astrophysical simulations

Abstract

Abstract. Numerical simulations have evolved continuously towards being an important field in astrophysics, equivalent to theory and observation. Due to the enormous developments in computer sciences, both hardware-and software-architecture, state-of-the-art simulations produce huge amounts of raw data with increasing complexity. In this paper some aspects of problems in the field of visualization in numerical astrophysics in combination with possible solutions are given. Commonly used visualization packages along with a newly developed approach to real-time visualization, incorporating shader programming to uncover the computational power of modern graphics cards, are presented. With these techniques at hand, real-time visualizations help scientists to understand the coherences in the results of their numerical simulations. Furthermore a fundamental problem in data analysis, i.e. coverage of metadata on how a visualization was created, is highlighted.

Energy Consumption Improvement Through a Visualization Software

“…These kinds of large computers are gap of energy efficiency and computation time is expensive. Kapferer & Riser (2008) proposed a method to visualize a large amount of spatial data (clusters of stars) without using expensive HPC. They used a volume rendering method based on particles to render data.…”

Scientific Visualization in Astronomy: Towards the Petascale Astronomy Era

“…To our knowledge, there have been no previous attempts to examine the status of scientific visualization in astronomy. The Masters thesis by Palomino (2003) discusses visualization strategies for several numerical datasets from astronomical simulations; Leech and Jenness (2005) surveyed visualization software available for radio and sub-millimetre data; Dubinski (2008) provided an introduction to particle visualization as a companion to a brief history of N-body methods; Kapferer and Riser (2008) considered software and hardware visualization requirements for numerical simulations; Li et al (2008) described strategies for dealing with multiwavelength data; and Fluke et al (2009) summarised some basic elements of cosmological visualization for observational and simulation data.…”

“…Navratil et al (2007) used Paraview and Partiview to render a time-dependent dataset of the first stars and their impact on cosmic history. Kapferer and Riser (2008) presented the usage of IFrIT, MayaVi data visualize, Paraview, and VisIT with a discussion of the visual quality aspects, generating interactive 3D movies, real-time vector-field visualization, and high-resolution display techniques. They also showed the usage of the VisTrials workflow system for saving visualization metadata.…”

“…Indeed, reproducing specific visualization results is challenging, particular when an interactive process has been used to control properties such as data limits, transparency, colour maps and orientation. Keeping metadata about the visualization process itself through an integrated workflow management system was addressed by Kapferer and Riser (2008). They discussed the usage of VisTrials 29 as a scientific workflow management system that provides support for data exploration and visualization.…”

Visualization for the Physical Sciences

“…On the contrary, there are many examples of papers where techniques from both scientific visualization (scivis), that deal with spatial data, and infovis are used to solve problems in the physical sciences both in the computer science [RPW*08, QCX*07, BWH*11] and in the domain specific [CPB*08, JMS*07, BJJ*07] literature. We also include references to survey papers in domain‐specific areas [HF11, KR08, EYD01, Val06].…”