Section: Application Domains

Scientific visualization

Participants : Guillaume Caumon, Nicolas Cherpeau, Samuel Hornus, Bruno Jobard, Bruno Lévy, Romain Merland, Vincent Nivoliers, Jeanne Pellerin, Nicolas Ray.

Figure 4. Our applications in oil exploration (A), plasma physics (B), molecular dynamics (C) and design (D)

Besides developing new solutions for geometry processing and numerical light simulation, we aim at applying these solutions to real-size scientific and industrial problems. In this context, scientific visualization is our main applications domain. With the advances in acquisition techniques, the size of the data sets to be processed increases faster than Moore's law, and represents a scientific and technical challenge. To ensure that our processing and visualization algorithms scale-up, we develop a combination of algorithmic, software and hardware architectures. Namely, we are interested in hierarchical function bases, and in parallel computation on GPUs (graphic processing units).

Our developments in parallel processing and GPU programming permit our geometry processing and light simulation solutions to scale-up, and handle real-scale data from other research and industry domains. The following applications are developed within the MIS (Modelization, Interaction, Simulation) and AOC (Analysis, Optimization and Control) programs, which are supported by the “Contrat de Plan État-Région Lorraine”.