Towards distributed visualization and analysis of large flow data

Fluid dynamics applications require a good understanding of the underlying physical phenomena. Therefore, effective procedures are necessary for analyzing and visualizing the various physical fields. Beside interactive and perceptually efficient techniques for visualizing flow fields directly, there is strong demand for methods that uncover hidden flow structures. Some recently developed feature based visual analysis methods are exemplarily presented. Fluid flow data typically are large and often are stored remotely or distributedly. The interactive visual analysis of such large data sets requires new software architectures - ideally utilizing emerging Grid standards. We discuss such architectures and report on specific software realizations.