Immersive and interactive exploration of billion-atom systems

  • Authors:

  • Ashish Sharma;Aiichiro Nakano;Rajiv K. Kalia;Priya Vashishta;Sanjay Kodiyalam;Paul Miller;Wei Zhao;Xinlian Liu;Timothy J. Campbell;Andy Haas

  • Affiliations:

  • Collaboratory for Advanced Computing and Simulations, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Dept. of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Dept. of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Louisiana;Dept. of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, Louisiana;Concurrent Computing Laboratory for Material Simulations, Louisiana State University, Louisiana;Biological Computing and Visualization Center, Louisiana State University, Louisiana;Naval Oceanographic Office Major, Shared Resourse Center, Stennis Space Center, Mississippi;Naval Oceanographic Office Major, Shared Resourse Center, Stennis Space Center, Mississippi

  • Venue:
  • Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - special issue: IEEE virtual reality 2002 conference
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We have developed a visualization system, named Atomsviewer, to render a billion atoms from the results of a molecular dynamics simulation. This system uses a hierarchical view frustum culling algorithm based on the octree data structure to efficiently remove atoms that are outside of the field of view. A novel occlusion culling algorithm, using a probability function, then selects atoms with a high probability of being visible. These selected atoms are further tested with a traditional occlusion culling algorithm before being rendered as spheres at varying levels of detail. To achieve scalability, Atomsviewer is distributed over a cluster of PCs that execute a parallelized version of the hierarchical view frustum culling and the probabilistic occlusion culling, and a graphics workstation that renders the atoms. We have used Atomsviewer to render a billion-atom data set on a dual processor SGI Onyx2 with an InfiniteReality2 graphics pipeline connected to a four-node PC cluster.