Project Summary
In many areas of science and engineering, studying time-varying phenomena is of paramount importance to understanding the intrinsic properties of complex underlying physical or chemical processes. Most of the studies are performed with large-scale numerical models to examine the fine details at the needed accuracy. Scientific visualization is an indispensable path to gleaning insight from the massive data produced by these numerical experiments. However, existing visualization technology lacks support for large, time-varying volume data. As a result, the value of conducting these immense and costly simulations is not being fully realized.
This ITR project addresses this urgent situation by dramatically improving the interactivity and explorability of large-scale, time-varying data visualization through the study and development of innovative data reduction methods, rendering and interaction techniques, and system integration strategies tailored to the characteristics of several representative leading-edge applications. This interdisciplinary research effort will involve students and researchers from six different research institutions in the US and Japan.
The project consists of a basic research component and a significant system/tool building component such that our research and development can be fully utilized and extensively evaluated by the application scientists with which we will closely collaborate. Such efforts can only be made possible with an ITR project at the proposed scale. The proposed research will result in new visualization software technologies that can significantly enhance the performance and experience of working scientists and engineers whose investigations relying heavily on large-scale modeling of evolving phenomena.