A Scalable System for Enormous Dataset Volume Visualization on Commodity Hardware

We are submitting this proposal in response to the call for proposals STTR A05-T002, topic "Distributed Heterogenous Large Data Visualization of Physics Based Simulations". The stated objective of the call is to develop a system capable of generating interactive visualizations of enormous datasets that result from physics-based simulations on US DoD High Performance Computing facilities. Interactive visualization of such datasets poses substantial challenges; researchers have studied the problem of rendering large, complex models at interactive frame rates for many years. Much of this study has been limited to the visualization of scenes composed primarily of polygonal geometry. For more complex scenes composed of structured and unstructured grid datasets, the challenge of interactive visualization is far greater. We propose to meet this challenge by building a prototype of a visualization system based on a foundation of our recent work on visibility computations and out-of-core algorithms, and novel algorithms for rendering large unstructured grids. Our proposed work has two main objectives: 1) to develop a client-server framework for the visualization of large datasets on a single workstation and on a cluster of PCs; and 2) to develop techniques for the interactive exploration of very large structured and unstructured datasets.