More of the Hayden Planetarium Vis Show

Some more information has come out about the Hayden Planetarium Show we discussed last month, this time more about the HPC resources and simulations used to create the spectacular datasets.

To create the simulation used in the show, Rempel and his team first designed a three-dimensional virtual domain to replicate a region on the sun 31,000 miles in length and height and about 5,100 miles in depth. The domain was large enough to fit an entire sunspot, which has a typical size of 12,000 to 19,000 miles, and provided enough resolution to view substructure on the scale of 20- to 30- miles.

The researchers then used TACC’s Ranger supercomputer to solve complex solar equations for each of 268 million points spaced 20- to 30- miles apart within the virtual domain. This involved processing approximately a terabyte of data and took several days to run on 512 processors.

via Feature – Visualizations go big in planetarium show.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.