VR visualization of large fluid flow data sets

In this paper we describe the effects being carried out by the Laboratory of Computational Physics, the Scientific Visualization Laboratory and the Virtual Reality Laboratory of the Naval Research Laboratory towards visualization of large data sets. We have concentrated on fluid flow hydrodynamics data sets. We describe the fully threaded tree structure developed at NRL to tackle the problem of massive parallel calculations using local mesh refinement methods. This structure was implemented with the IBM Data Explorer environment, allowing a multiresolution visualization system that inherits the properties of the tree structure in a natural way. We also describe the visualization of these data sets in a virtual environment.