CAREER: Toward Effective Visualization of Large Scale Time-Varying Data

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

New challenges for computational scientists have emerged in the past several years as the size of data generated from simulations has experienced an exponential growth. One major factor that is contributing to the growth of data size is the increasingly widespread ability to perform very large-scale time-varying simulations. This project aims to design efficient data processing and effective feature extraction techniques to facilitate large-scale time-varying data analysis. The specific goal of this research is to study the following fundamental problems in time-varying visualization algorithms: (1) Design spatio-temporal data encoding and management schemes to facilitate run-time browsing and analysis of data at arbitrary spatial and temporal scales, (2) Develop accelerated visualization algorithms to utilize spatial and temporal data coherence. Topics of interest include the design of space-efficient time-varying isosurface extraction algorithms, automatic level of detail algorithms for multi resolution time-varying volume rendering, and load balanced parallel data distribution and visualization schemes, (3) Design novel time-varying feature enhancement and tracking techniques. Specifically, focus is on the development of novel high dimensional volume projection techniques to highlight the progression and evolution of time-dependent features, and high dimensional geometric algorithms to track time varying is contours and interval volumes. Focus is also on the design of effective transfer functions used in volume rendering to extract salient time-dependent features