ERCIM News No.27 - October 1996

An Integrated Visualization Environment for Computational Steering

by Martin Göbel and Stanislav Klimenko
Russian scientists of the Institute for High Energy Physics in Moscow are in cooperation with GMD since 1993 in the area of Scientific Visualization of Complex Physics Phenomena. This cooperation fulfills research in the visualization of simulation results of the quantum Coulomb three-body problem. The visualization results are important for the catalysed fusion phenomenon which promises to be used for the production of energy.

Visualization is of significant importance in quantum mechanics issues as new insight may be gathered from images showing hidden properties. Interactive Scientific Visualization allows to discover important features in the behavior the functions representing the above mentioned problem.

The future cooperation between the Institute of System Programming of Russian Academy of Science and GMD's Institute for Media Communication, Research Area Visualization and Media Systems Design, is based on this previous work.

This cooperation aims for the design and implementation of new visualization methods and tools for data sets obtained from high performance computing in complex physics phenomena and high performance simulation of complex systems such as space mission training.

The research will be focused on theo-retical problems and develop application oriented prototypes following areas:
An advantage in this cooperation will be the good experience of both partners in 3D graphics software development, object-oriented programming, parallel processing and scientific visualization.

One practical goal of the project is to integrate a simulation procedure into a visualization environment in order to analyze the results online, ie an interactive simulation rather than an visualization postprocessor is anticipated. This could be done by means of distributed processing over a set of high performance computers while the visualization is performed by a graphical workstation.

Interactive control of the simulation by changing parameters interactively, should immediately effect the simulation and result in a visualization update. This process is called computational steering and it will increase the effective use of computer time.

The integration of visualization and computing allows the user to access the computation directly rather than working with prefabricated results. Spontaneous computing is aimed where all objects are 'visible', rather than interactive computing where only a limited user dialog is possible. The system architecture is based on a number of agents: a computation agent to manage the numerical objects, a visualization agent graphical objects, a story agent to manage persistent objects and a control agent to manage other agents. The enabling technologies are the object-oriented paradigm and the visualization reference model. Current research challenges include domain specific data-models, algorithm visualization, new visual programming paradigm and 3D interaction techniques with direct manipulation will be covered.


Scientific visualiazation in a virtual envoronment
using GMD's virtual workbench.


Object-oriented approach provides a maximum level of abstraction from many technical details. Inheritance allows to achieve maximum code reusability and to support new data type creation for adding new specific features to available software. Polymorphism allows to organize software functionality in unified manner for different kinds of data. Incapsulation and data protection are the powerful facilities which improve software reliability.

The project we will also take practical aspects of system design and usability into consideration as well as the significance of visualization for practical use.

Please contact:
Martin Göbel - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 2367
E-mail: goebel@gmd.de
or Stanislav Klimenko - Russian Academy of Science
Tel: +7 095 912 46 14
E-mail: klimenko@mxihep.sn

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