Visualization of Parallel Data based on Procedural Access

Summary

Large scale applications in numerical continuum mechanics and especially in computational fluid dynamics require enormous computing power and extensive storage. For post processing purposes and to support visual debugging a flexible toolbox of visualization methods addressing the user data directly in the distributed environment is essential. A concept based on procedural access to the data on arbitrary meshes is presented. It leads to an inheritance of a large group of visualization methods developed for scalar data, and is well suited for debugging and visualization during code and data structure construction. Changing the computational mesh representation the user has to adapt his specific procedural interface. Thereby he does not need to know about the visualization routines. Similarly, solely the communication interface has to be changed if a new parallel machine is added to the configuration. But this is decoupled from the visualization itself and the grid type. The presented approach can efficiently be implemented. Aspects and results from an implementation under PVM [13] are discussed.