A unified approach to adapt scientific visualization systems to third-party solvers

Abstract

This paper presents a new unified approach to adapt scientific visualization systems to third-party solvers implemented on different software and hardware platforms. This approach allows building multiplatform visualization systems, enables automatic conversion of input and output data from any solver into a rendering-compatible format, and provides real-time generation of high-quality images. The automated adaptation of visualization systems to third-party solvers is based on ontological engineering methods. Multiplatform portability is provided by the automatic generation of a graphical user interface (GUI) for each particular operating system and by preprocessing the data to be rendered by using heuristic-based tools, which ensures compatibility with different hardware and software platforms, including desktop computers and mobile devices. In addition, an original anti-aliasing algorithm is proposed to ensure high quality of resulting images. Based on the proposed approach, a multiplatform scientific visualization system called SciVi is developed, which is successfully used for solving various real-world scientific visualization problems from different application domains.