A visualization environment for supercomputing-based applications in computational mechanics

The authors characterize a visualization environment that has been designed and prototyped for a large community of scientists and engineers, with an emphasis in supercomputing-based computational mechanics. 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 authors summarize certain observations which they have made regarding the implementation of such visualization environments.