High End Scientific Visualization with Scalable Display System

Abstract

Today we can have huge datasets resulting from computer simulations (FEA, CFD, physics, chemistry etc) and sensor measurements (medical, seismic and satellite). There is exponential growth in computational requirements in scientific research. Modern parallel computers and Grid are providing the required computational power for the simulation runs. The rich visualization is essential in interpreting the large, dynamic data generated from these simulation runs. The visualization process maps these datasets onto graphical representations and then generates the pixel representation. The large number of pixels shows the picture in greater details and interaction with it enables the greater insight on the part of user in understanding the data more quickly, picking out small anomalies that could turn out to be critical and make better decisions. However, the memory constraints in frame buffer, lack of the rendering power and the display resolution offered by even the most powerful graphics workstation makes the visualization of this magnitude difficult or impossible. This paper focuses on building an environment which render and drive over 47 millions of pixels, using the open source software framework. Our system's display geometry is easy to configure and reconfigure, accommodates casually tiled displays and arbitrary display surfaces, and can be operational in a matter of minutes. In addition, the underlying distributed rendering architecture (chromium) is transparent to existing OpenGL applications, requiring no custom APIs or re-compilation of existing OpenGL executables. In short, we present a practical and flexible low-cost tiled display system that is simple to deploy and easy to operate. We also describe the software packages developed for such a system and its use to visualize data generated by computational simulations and applications requiring higher intrinsic display resolution and more display space.