Interactive Visualization and Analysis of High Resolution HPC Simulation Data on a Laptop With VTK

We present a highly efficient solution to interact with the Deep Water Impact Ensemble Data Set provided for the Scientific Visualization Contest 2018. Interactive visualization is made possible on one core of a laptop with the full resolution and the same accuracy as in the original data set, when originally 256 up to 2048 supercomputer nodes were required to generate the data. As far as we know this is the only way to achieve full-resolution exploration on a laptop. We first expose how our approach allows more efficient visualization by using the Tree-Based Adaptive Mesh Refinement grid data structure we introduced in VTK, vtkHyperTreeGrid [1], as compared to structured or unstructured approaches. Then we elaborate on the visualization capabilities offered by vtkHyperTreeGrid-optimized algorithms and the performance achieved on the limited resources available on a laptop. Next, we present how the hierarchical structure makes possible novel ways of exploring data interactively and helps achieve accelerated data exploration by hierarchically driving decimation of values. Finally, we show preliminary results of interactive volume rendering using splatting.