Tech Report CS-01-03

Immersive Hierarchical Visualization and Steering for Spectral/hp Element Methods

Jonathan Reiter, R.M. Kirby, and Joseph J. LaViola Jr.

May 2001

Abstract:

We present the first steps in our hierarchical visualization and steering research targeted at large time-dependent spectral/hp element methods. This research is built around several observations concerning the structure of spectral/hp data which lead to the development of several hierarchical visualization techniques. These techniques provide an attractive vehicle for building a complete end-to-end hierarchical visualization and steering system. This paper discusses our techniques in conjunction with the Pilot system, a first implementation of these ideas in the form of an immersive hierarchical visualization and steering system for spectral/hp element simulations. Pilot allows the user to control the level of extracted and visualized detail on a local basis throughout the simulation's domain and provides the user with an immersive computational steering interface to interact directly with the simulation. This combination of techniques allows us to use Pilot to visualize the results of large concurrently-running spectral/hp element CFD simulations.

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