The NCSA has just issued a press release showcasing some of the first scientific visualizations coming from the new Blue Waters machine. Focusing on star formation, supernova, and Big Bang research, it’s a great collection of images and details on how petascale visualization is done.
These collaborations have provided insight into the size and type of data that each team will produce as well as their individual analysis needs. It became immediately clear that the size of the data, the variety of data formats, and the domain-specific analysis needs would be the defining factors in formulating an effective visualization strategy. Two visualization software packages, VisIt and Paraview, were chosen to satisfy this need. Both suites offer the ability to ingest large volumes of data, use distributed memory parallelism, and read a variety of data formats. These software suites were installed on the Blue Waters Early Science System.
via Blue Waters visualization team provides first science images.
