NPAC Technical Report SCCS-573

An Interactive Remote Visualization Environment for an Electromagnetic Scattering Simultation on a High Performance Computing System

Gang Cheng, Y Lu, Geoffrey Fox, Kim Mills, Tomasz Haupt

Submitted January 1 1994


Abstract

Electromagnetic scattering(EMS) simulation is an important computationally intensive application within the field of electromagnetics. Advances in high performance computing and communication (HPCC) and data visualization environment(DVE) provide new opportunities to visualize real-time simulation problems such as EMS which require significant computational resources. In this work, an integrated interactive visualization environment was created for an EMS simulation, coupling a graphical user interface(GUI) for runtime simulation parameters input and 3D rendering output on a graphical workstation, with computational modules running on a parallel supercomputer and two workstations. Application Visualization System(AVS) was used as integrating software to facilitate both networking and scientific data visualization. Using the EMS simulation as a case study in this paper, we explore the AVS data flow methodology to naturally integrate data visualization, parallel systems and heterogeneous computing. Major issues in integrating this remote visualization system are discussed, including task decomposition, system integration, concurrent control, and a high level DVE-based distributed programming model.


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