A well recognized advantage of high performance computing environments is the ability to fully utilize advanced visualization techniques. Employing scalable parallel processing is no exception. Visualization techniques enhance the understanding of physical phenomena through the viewing of important relationships of information not normally seen by the scientist or engineer. Further, this information can more easily be communicated to others involved in the exploration process or who use the information to make important decisions, including the consumer who will decide whether to buy a product or not. However, many of the visualization processing steps are computationally expensive or require long production lead times.
In this project, we extend visualization capabilities to the CRAY T3D to take full advantage of parallel processing. In so doing, processing runtimes will be significantly reduced, opening new interactive avenues for the scientist and engineer to more completely explore and understand his data. To accomplish this, we will leverage the existing base of visualization software capabilities. This effort focuses primarily around the Application Visualization System (AVS) distributed by AVS, Inc.