Will Usher

Visualizing the large-scale datasets output by HPC resources presents a difficult challenge, as the memory and compute power required become prohibitively expensive for end user systems.

Mapping the extent of flood events is a necessary and important aspect of disaster management.

The increasing demand for larger and higher fidelity simulations has made Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) and unstructured mesh techniques essential to focus compute effort and memory cost on just the areas of interest in the simulation domain.

New web technologies have enabled the deployment of powerful GPU-based computational pipelines that run entirely in the web browser, opening a new frontier for accessible scientific visualization applications.

In the previous post we saw how to build, ship and debug a C++ WebAssembly (WASM) application, where we had the compute and rendering parts of our app written in C++ and compiled to WASM, while the other frontend parts of the app were written in TypeScript

WebAssembly (WASM) is an exciting, and now practically ubiquitous, browser technology that allows for compiling code from a number of languages to run at near-native speed in the browser.

Figure 1: The happy duck we’ll be able to render at the end of this post Now that we can load up complex scene hierarchies from glTF files and render them correctly, let’s start getting some more interesting colors on screen!

WebGPU is a powerful GPU-API for the web, providing support for advanced low-overhead rendering pipelines and GPU compute pipelines.

New web technologies have enabled the deployment of powerful GPU-based computational pipelines that run entirely in the web browser, opening a new frontier for accessible scientific visualization applications.

Spherical harmonics glyphs are an established way to visualize high angular resolution diffusion imaging data.

Figure 1: In this post, we’ll look at how to fix our terribly broken 2 Cylinder Engine.

Now that we’ve seen how to draw a triangle in the first post and hook up camera controls so we can look around in the second post, we’re at the point where the avocado really hits the screen and we can start drawing our first glTF primitives!

In this second post of the series we’ll learn about Bind Groups, which let us pass buffers and textures to our shaders.

WebGPU is a modern graphics API for the web, in development by the major browser vendors.

Large scale graphs are used to encode data from a variety of application domains such as social networks, the web, biological networks, road maps, and finance.

We describe a systematic approach for rendering time-varying simulation data produced by exa-scale simulations, using GPU workstations.

Large-scale simulations on nonuniform particle distributions that evolve over time are widely used in cosmology, molecular dynamics, and engineering.

"The continuing growth in computational power available on high-performance computing systems has allowed for increasingly higher fidelity simulations.

Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (Structured AMR) enables simulations to adapt the domain resolution to save computation and storage, and has become one of the dominant data representations used by scientific simulations; however, efficiently rendering…

Researchers in the field of connectomics are working to reconstruct a map of neural connections in the brain in order to understand at a fundamental level how the brain processes information.

To address the problem of ever-growing scientific data sizes making data movement a major hindrance to analysis, we introduce a novel encoding for scalar fields: a unified tree of resolution and precision, specifically constructed so that valid cuts corre…

The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip.

We present a technique that leverages ray tracing hardware available in recent Nvidia RTX GPUs to solve a problem other than classical ray tracing.

I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB model to use for some lightweight server tasks on my home network.

Now that it’s been a bit over a week since VIS 2020 ended I thought I’d write up some information on the streaming infrastructure we used during conference.

Information visualization applications have become ubiquitous, in no small part thanks to the ease of wide distribution and deployment to users enabled by the web browser.

We present dw2, a flexible and easy-to-use software infrastructure for interactive rendering of large tiled display walls.

The term 'in situ processing' has evolved over the last decade to mean both a specific strategy for visualizing and analyzing data and an umbrella term for a processing paradigm.

With the recent addition of hardware ray tracing capabilities, GPUs have become incredibly efficient at ray tracing both triangular geometry, and instances thereof.

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques allow for representing a simulation’s computation domain in an adaptive fashion.

This paper presents a comprehensive study of rendering techniques for 3D line sets with transparency.

DirectX Ray Tracing, Vulkan’s NV Ray Tracing extension, and OptiX (or collectively, the RTX APIs) build on the same execution model for running user code to trace and process rays.

Sample based ray marching is an effective method for direct volume rendering of unstructured meshes.

To determine if a hit point can be directly lit by a light source in the scene we need to perform a visibility test between the point and the light.

Particle data are used across a diverse set of large scale simulations, for example, in cosmology, molecular dynamics and combustion.

Image- and data-parallel rendering across multiple nodes on high-performance computing systems is widely used in visualization to provide higher frame rates, support large data sets, and render data in situ.

We present a general high-performance technique for ray tracing generalized tube primitives.

We explore a first proof-of-concept example of creatively using the Turing generation's hardware ray tracing cores to solve a problem other than classical ray tracing, specifically, point location in unstructured tetrahedral meshes.

Figure 1: Example volume renderings, using the WebGL volume renderer described in this post.

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a key technology for large-scale simulations that allows for adaptively changing the simulation mesh resolution, resulting in significant computational and storage savings.

As simulations grow in scale, the need for in situ analysis methods to handle the large data produced grows correspondingly.

When writing a paper in LaTeX, it’s common to leave notes and comments in the text, either to yourself or your co-authors.

Large-scale simulations can easily produce data in excess of what can be efficiently visualized using production visualization software, making it challenging for scientists to gain insights from the results of these simulations.

The need to scale next-generation industrial engineering problems to the largest computational platforms presents unique challenges.

Tracing neurons in large-scale microscopy data is crucial to establishing a wiring diagram of the brain, which is needed to understand how neural circuits in the brain process information and generate behavior.

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) methods are widespread in scientific computing, and visualizing the resulting data with efficient and accurate rendering methods can be vital for enabling interactive data exploration.

We present a new method for progressive volume rendering by accumulating object-space samples over successively rendered frames.

We present a system for interactive in situ visualization of large particle simulations, suitable for general CPU-based HPC architectures.