Seeing the Difference between Cosmological Simulations

摘要

Visualizing the time-variant results of a simulation can help scientists see patterns that would be difficult to find using only statistics. Furthermore, visualizing the differences between multiple simulations can let scientists directly analyze the simulations'' consistency. In this article, we describe our interactive application for viewing the differences between multiple time-variant cosmological simulations. Using programmable shaders and multiple visualization techniques, the application illustrates how the properties of millions of particles vary across simulations. In doing so, we aim to help scientists find patterns in variance across dimensions, simulation parameters, and time. The driving force behind this study is a series of cosmological particle data sets with multiple dimensions of data as well as temporal changes and variability across all of the dimensions. We specifically examine past scenarios wherein a particle visualization requires a defined spatial element and multiple additional dimensions. Expanding on our previous work, we also show examples of the multiple structural components of the data sets, which can be difficult to qualitatively investigate without visualization.