A comparative evaluation of three volume rendering libraries for the visualization of sheared thermal convection

TL;DR

This paper compares three volume rendering libraries within ParaView to determine the most effective method for visualizing sheared thermal convection in ocean simulations, aiding scientists in interpreting large-scale turbulent flow data.

Contribution

It provides a comparative evaluation of GPU and CPU-based volume rendering solutions for visualizing complex oceanic thermal convection data.

Findings

GPU-based solutions outperform CPU-based in rendering speed

NVIDIA's IndeX library offers superior visualization quality

The study guides selection of rendering tools for large-scale ocean simulations

Abstract

Oceans play a big role in the nature of our planet, about $ 70 \% $ of our earth is covered by water. Strong currents are transporting warm water around the world making life possible, and allowing us to harvest its power producing energy. Yet, oceans also carry a much more deadly side. Floods and tsunamis can easily annihilate whole cities and destroy life in seconds. The earth's climate system is also very much linked to the currents in the ocean due to its large coverage of the earth's surface, thus, gaining scientific insights into the mechanisms and effects through simulations is of high importance. Deep ocean currents can be simulated by means of wall-bounded turbulent flow simulations. To support these very large scale numerical simulations and enable the scientists to interpret their output, we deploy an interactive visualization framework to study sheared thermal convection. The visualizations are based on volume rendering of the temperature field. To address the needs of supercomputer users with different hardware and software resources, we evaluate different volume rendering implementations supported in the ParaView environment: two GPU-based solutions with Kitware's native volume mapper or NVIDIA's IndeX library, and a CPU-only Intel OSPRay-based implementation.