This dynamic effect was not noticed in earlier visualizations, but the 3-D movies allowed us to closely examine the size and structure of the small clump. While these results are impressive, demonstrating the performance is only half of the objective. Extensibility and applicability of our tools to other physical systems was also an important goal. To promote usefulness of the tools, the source code for the prototype has been released, along with full documentation of the methods, plus notes on the design of the framework. This extensive documentation allows other workers to understand what we have done and implement or extend it in their own work.
Future work is aimed at visualizing larger data sets.
The power of the simulation code lies in its use of tree data structures to decompose the data hierarchically. This makes the computations more efficient as well as allowing effective distribution of the work load over multiple processors. We plan to link the visualization to the simulation engine so that a Beowulf cluster can be used to subsample dense regions and compute the information needed for the visualization in parallel. This will allow us to perform interactive visualizations of much larger simulations.