Interactive In-Situ Online Monitoring of Large Scale CFD Simulations with Cut-Planes

Abstract

Online monitoring of running simulations is gaining importance in order to inspect or validate ongoing calculations. With increasing high performance computing capacities copying raw data to a dedicated visualization cluster becomes too expensive. Therefore, insitu approaches using same compute resources are required. Cut-planes became a common visualization tool in order to analyze complex three-dimensional scalar fields. Within this method, interesting regions are sliced with one or more planes on which the intersected scalar field is represented. To explore the whole dataset, cut-planes need to be moved around interactively which requires high update rates. Typical cut-plane algorithms process all cells crossed by the plane resulting in high extraction times and output sizes. In order to provide guaranteed response times we use a progressive sampling scheme instead. By sampling the cut-plane at distinct positions the presented methods are independent of the cell count in the affected region. In this paper we present a solution combining interactive exploration inside a virtual reality environment and in-situ cut-plane extraction supporting required interactive update rates.