Immersive and 3D viewers for CUMULVS: VTK/CAVE and AVS/Express
This paper will discuss the development of two viewer interfaces for the CUMULVS system, one for virtual reality (VR) visualization via ImmersaDesk/CAVE systems, and one for 3D data visualization using the commercial component-based AVS/Express visualization environment. The CUMULVS (Collaborative, User Migration, User Library for Visualization and Steering) system, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is an essential platform for interacting with high-performance scientific simulation programs on-the-fly. It provides runtime visualization of data while they are being computed, as well as coordinated computational steering, application-directed checkpointing and fault recovery mechanisms, and rudimentary model coupling functions. CUMULVS consists of a set of cooperative libraries that enable the dynamic attachment of front-end viewer programs to running applications, for interactive visualization of extracted data snapshots using a variety of visualization tools. A development strategy will be presented for integrating CUMULVS with the given visualization libraries and environments, including discussion of the various data transformations and the visualization pipeline necessary for converting raw CUMULVS data into fully rendered graphical entities. In addition to the immersive VR CUMULVS viewer, an overview of the object-based AVS/Express CUMULVS viewer design will be presented, including discussion of the various components, modules, macros and user interfaces. A comparison will be made of the two viewer design approaches.
cumulvs cave immersadesk scientific visualization immersive visualization