Two New Contributions to the Visualization of AMR Grids: I. Interactive Rendering of Extreme-Scale 2-Dimensional Grids II. Novel Selection Filters in Arbitrary Dimension

Abstract

We present here the result of continuation work, performed to further fulfill the vision we outlined in [Harel,Lekien,P\'eba\"y-2017] for the visualization and analysis of tree-based adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations, using the hypertree grid paradigm which we proposed. The first filter presented hereafter implements an adaptive approach in order to accelerate the rendering of 2-dimensional AMR grids, hereby solving the problem posed by the loss of interactivity that occurs when dealing with large and/or deeply refined meshes. Specifically, view parameters are taken into account, in order to: on one hand, avoid creating surface elements that are outside of the view area; on the other hand, utilize level-of-detail properties to cull those cells that are deemed too small to be visible with respect to the given view parameters. This adaptive approach often results in a massive increase in rendering performance. In addition, two new selection filters provide data analysis capabilities, by means of allowing for the extraction of those cells within a hypertree grid that are deemed relevant in some sense, either geometrically or topologically. After a description of these new algorithms, we illustrate their use within the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) in which we implemented them. This note ends with some suggestions for subsequent work.