iSGTW has a great piece on the importance of Scientific Visualization and the growth of dedicated interactive analysis clusters in some of the big DOD/DOE labs, including some great quotes from VizWorld regulars Sean Ahern and Kelly Gaither.
“Data without analysis is nothing,” Ahern said. “If you’ve run a giant simulation, you’ve only done half the work. The real science comes from processing that data into something that people can understand. The job of science is done in the phase of analysis, and that’s purely where we live.”
They also highlite a typically forgotten feature of Visualization: Computational Debugging. Certain bugs in HPC codes can be hard to spot numerically, but really show up in visualization. Problems like bad edge conditions (Using a reflecting boundary instead of a wraparound or exit boundary) or repeating numerical errors lead to patterns that are easily to see visually with interactive visualization tools, but nearly impossible with traditional numerical methods.
