Terapixel imaging of cosmological simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization approach for large-scale cosmological simulations, enabling interactive exploration of terabyte-sized datasets through web-based terapixel images and animations.

Contribution

It presents a method to raster and process massive simulation data into accessible, high-resolution images and animations for web-based interactive visualization.

Findings

Created a static terapixel image of the MassiveBlack simulation.

Developed an interactive zoomable animation of a large simulation dataset.

Made visualization software publicly available.

Abstract

The increasing size of cosmological simulations has led to the need for new visualization techniques. We focus on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamical (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 datasets in both in spatial and temporal dimensions, datasets 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 one thousand 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.