Publications Details
A distributed visualization environment for engineering sciences
As a multiprogram engineering laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has major research and development responsibilities for nuclear weapons, arms control, energy, environment, and other areas of strategic importance to national security. To accomplish this diversified mission, analysts within the Engineering Sciences Directorate support the entire laboratory using finite element and finite difference solution schemes to solve problems in fluid dynamics (steady state and transient, compressible and incompressible), thermodynamics (heat transfer), hydrodynamics (impact physics, penetration mechanics), solid mechanics (structural/thermal analysis, fracture mechanics, ground subsidence, impact modeling) and structural dynamics. To assist these analysts in performing these analyses most efficiently, the Applied Visualization Group was formed and tasked to develop a ``production scientific visualization environment.`` In this paper, we characterize a visualization environment that has been designed and prototyped for a large community of scientists and engineers. The proposed environment makes use of a visualization server concept to provide effective, interactive visualization to the user`s desktop. Benefits of using the visualization server approach are discussed. Some thoughts regarding desirable features for visualization server hardware architectures are also addressed. A brief discussion of the software environment is included. The paper concludes by summarizing certain observations which we have made regarding the implementation of such visualization environments.