Scientific discovery through advanced visualization

The SciDAC program of the Department of Energy has brought together tremendous scientific expertises and computing resources to realize the promise of terascale computing for attempting to answer some of the most important basic science questions. Scientific visualization is an indispensable path to gleaning insight from the massive data produced by terascale simulations. Unless the visualization challenges presented by the terascale simulations be adequately addressed, the value of conducting these immense and costly simulations is not being fully realized. In this paper, we introduce several key visualization technologies that address the critical need of many SciDAC scientists in the application areas from accelerator simulations, earthquake modeling, plasma physics, supernova modeling, to turbulent combustion simulations.