Visualization of Hybrid, N-Body and Octree-Based Adaptive Mesh Resolution Parallelized Simulations

In this paper, we report on the development of a visualization software which address the issue of the interactive visualization of three-dimensional hybrid simulations combining an N-body module and a grid-based solver with an octree-based adaptive mesh. The difficulty inherent to the hybrid nature of the data and the complexity of the mesh structure used to describe both scalar and vector fields is enhanced by the fact that simulations are parallelized. Large-scale simulations are conducted on high-performance mainframes with potentially thousands of processors associated with a non-trivial domain decomposition. The software we present is deployed in the framework of IDL object graphics as part of the SDvision graphics tool used primarily in the visualization of astrophysical simulations. It combines in a single scene the graphics objects of the N-body system and the grid-based fields, together with a visual representation of the octree mesh, suitable for interactive and immersive navigation.