Terapixel Imaging of Cosmological Simulations
Abstract
The increasing size of cosmological simulations has led to the need for new visualization techniques. We focus on smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations run with the GADGET code and describe methods for visually accessing the entire simulation at full resolution. The simulation snapshots are rastered and processed on supercomputers into images that are ready to be accessed through a Web interface (GigaPan). This allows any scientist with a Web browser to interactively explore simulation data sets in both spatial and temporal dimensions and data sets which in their native format can be hundreds of terabytes in size or more. We present two examples, the first a static terapixel image of the MassiveBlack simulation, a P-GADGET SPH simulation with 65 billion particles, and the second an interactively zoomable animation of a different simulation with more than 1000 frames, each a gigapixel in size. Both are available for public access through the GigaPan Web interface. We also make our imaging software publicly available.
BibTeX
@article{Feng-2011-106565,author = {Yu Feng and Rupert A. C. Croft and Tiziana Di Matteo and Nishikanta Khandai and Randy Sargent and Illah Nourbakhsh and Paul Dille and Chris Bartley and Volker Springel and Anirban Jana and Jeffrey Gardner},
title = {Terapixel Imaging of Cosmological Simulations},
journal = {Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series},
year = {2011},
month = {December},
volume = {197},
number = {2},
}