Recent Advances in VisIt: AMR Streamlines and Query-driven Visualization

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) is a highly effective method for simulations spanning a large range of spatiotemporal scales such as those encountered in astrophysical simulations. Combining research in novel AMR visualization algorithms and basic infrastructure work, the Department of Energy (DOE) Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET) has extended VisIt, an open source visualization tool that can handle AMR data without converting it to alternate representations. This paper focuses on two recent advances in the development of VisIt. First, we have developed streamline computation methods that properly handle multi-domain data sets and utilize effectively multiple processors on parallel machines. Furthermore, we are working on streamline calculation methods that consider an AMR hierarchy and detect transitions from a lower resolution patch into a finer patch and improve interpolation at level boundaries. Second, we focus on visualization of large-scale particle data sets. By integrating the DOE Scientific Data Management (SDM) Center's FastBit indexing technology into VisIt, we are able to reduce particle counts effectively by thresholding and by loading only those particles from disk that satisfy the thresholding criteria. Furthermore, using FastBit it becomes possible to compute parallel coordinate views efficiently, thus facilitating interactive data exploration of massive particle data sets.