Coupled Analysis and Visualization of High Resolution Astrophysical Simulations

摘要

Computational physics has benefited from on-going microproces-sor innovations, which have enabled larger and larger numerical simulations. One consequence of these technological advancements has been an explosion in the amount of data generated. For many modelers, available software tools and computing resources are proving inadequate for investigation of high-resolution numerical outputs. In this paper we discuss the general problems associated with very large data visualization and analysis and our work on a particular solution to those through the development of VAPOR (open source, available at http://www.vapor.ucar.edu): a desktop application that leverages today's powerful CPUs and GPUs to enable visualization and analysis of terascale data sets using only a commodity PC or laptop. We briefly illustrate VAPOR's utility through the exploration of a high-resolution simulation aimed at understanding the effects of hydrogen ionization on convective dynamics in stellar envelopes.