Topological Analysis and CinemaDB Enable Richer Exploration of In Situ Visualization Results

(Left) WarpX Laser Plasma Particle Accelerator Simulation with 109 data points. (Right, Upper Image) Top features selected via contour tree. (Right, Lower Image) Storage in CinemaDB enables flexible features combination in post hoc analysis.

Scientific Achievement

New topological analysis method [1] stores images of individual features in a Cinema database to enable richer post hoc exploration of in situ simulation visualization results.

Significance and Impact

The widening gap between compute power and I/O bandwidth requires computing visualizations in situ, i.e., while simulation is running. Our new method makes it possible to automatically save individual images of most relevant features, increase flexibility during post hoc exploration and gain more insight in simulation results.

Research Details

  • Isosurface extraction is one of the most common visualization techniques
  • New approach for shared-memory parallel simplification of contour trees enables automatic selection of contours, benefiting a wide range of application domains; the developed techniques can also serve as basis for high-level feature detection and analysis methods
  • New approach to saving images of individual topological features in Cinema database reduces storage requirements while still facilitating greater degree of explorative analysis

Contact

  • Gunther H. Weber

Bibliography

  1. P. Hristov, G. H. Weber, H. A. Carr, O. Rübel, and J. P. Ahrens, “Data Parallel Hypersweeps for In Situ Topological Analysis,” in Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), pp. 12–21, Oct. 2020.