In situ ray tracing and computational steering for interactive blood flow simulation

• Published in: Computer physics communications 2010-02, Vol.181 (2), p.355-370
• Main Authors: Mazzeo, Marco D., Manos, Steven, Coveney, Peter V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computational steering; Hemodynamics; In situ visualisation; Ray tracing
• ISSN: 0010-4655; 1879-2944
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2009.10.013

Recent algorithm and hardware developments have significantly improved our capability to interactively visualise time-varying flow fields. However, when visualising very large dynamically varying datasets interactively there are still limitations in the scalability and efficiency of these methods. Here we present a rendering pipeline which employs an efficient in situ ray tracing technique to visualise flow fields as they are simulated. The ray casting approach is particularly well suited for the visualisation of large and sparse time-varying datasets, where it is capable of rendering fluid flow fields at high image resolutions and at interactive frame rates on a single multi-core processor using OpenMP. The parallel implementation of our in situ visualisation method relies on MPI, requires no specialised hardware support, and employs the same underlying spatial decomposition as the fluid simulator. The visualisation pipeline allows the user to operate on a commodity computer and explore the simulation output interactively. Our simulation environment incorporates numerous features that can be utilised in a wide variety of research contexts.