The design and implementation of the Cortex visualization system

Cortex has been designed for interactive analysis and display of simulation data generated by CFD applications based on unstructured-grid solvers. Unlike post-processing visualization environments, Cortex is designed to work in co-processing mode with the CFD application. This significantly reduces data storage and data movement requirements for visualization and also allows users to interactively steer the application. Further, Cortex supports high-performance by running on massively parallel computers and workstation clusters. An important goal for Cortex, is to provide visualization to a variety of solvers which differ in their solution methodologies and supported flow models. Coupled with the co-processing requirement, this has required the development of a well defined programming interface to the CFD solver that lets the visualization system communicate efficiently with the solver, and requires minimal programming effort for porting to new solvers. Further, the requirement for targeting multiple solvers and application niches demands that the visualization system be rapidly and easily modifiable. Such flexibility is attained in Cortex by using the high-level, interpreted language Scheme for implementing user-interfaces and high-level visualization functions. By making the Scheme interpreter available from the Cortex text interface, the user can also customize and extend the visualization system