Fidelity in visualizing large-scale simulations

Computer simulations are powerful tools frequently used today in many important applications, for example to build safer buildings, to crash-test an automobile before it is built, to stabilize the Pisa tower, to design artificial joints that are comfortable and durable, or to investigate what-if scenarios to avoid and best recover from natural or man-made disasters. The simulation codes have reached a very highlevel of sophistication and, by running on powerful computing machinery, can accurately track with infinitesimal time steps dozens of physical properties of millions of interacting elements under extreme conditions. In order to take fully advantage of the bounty of information concealed in the data produced, visualization is a uniquely powerful tool since it caters to the sense that provides our highest bandwidth connection to the surrounding world. Unfortunately, simulation results are usually examined with graphics and visualization tools that are one or several steps behind the state-of-the-art. We describe our efforts of producing high-fidelity visualizations of the results of large-scale simulations using the latest commercial rendering and animation systems. To this effect we built a scalable and reusable link between the software worlds of animation and simulation. Our system also offers a set of tools that allow integrating the results of the simulation in the surrounding scene, of great importance when the intended audience extends beyond the researchers that designed the simulation. We built our system as part of the efforts of a larger, interdisciplinary team to produce a high-quality, physically accurate visualization of the September 11 attack on the Pentagon.(C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.