Nonlinear Evolution of the Universe:
from 20 million to 14 billion years old

The cosmological simulation computes the nonlinear evolution of the universe in the context of the standard cosmological model determined by the Wilkinson Microwave Background Anisotropy experiment.

The simulation has the highest (mass) resolution of all simulations of this type computed in 2005-6 with detailed physics treated in a large cosmological volume which is necessary to form for example clusters of galaxies.

Small volume simulations do not generate this level of galaxy clusters.

Scientific Visualization: Dr. Jeremiah Ostriker, and Dr. Renyue Cen, Princeton University
Visualization by NCSA AVL: Donna Cox, Lorne Leonard, Robert Patterson, Stuart Levy, Alex Betts

• Total CPU time used to develop, debug and run the scientific simulation on Cobalt was about 100,000-150,000 hours; 3 weeks NCSAs SGI Altix 1024 processors with 3 terabytes shared memory
• 749 GB of data generated from the full simulation
• AVL used 322 GB subset of the simulation data for rendering visualizations
• 8 SGI Prisms were used to generate scientific visualizations
• NCSA custom software and Star Renderer used to generate scientific visualizations
• 35 GB of HD images (1937 frames) have been generated for various HD venues

Visualization of an F3 Tornado:
storm chaser perspective

Scientists used pre-storm conditions from an observed F4 tornado in South Dakota in 2003 to initialize a simulation that produces a severe supercell storm that produces a powerful tornado and terabytes of data.

Data driven visualization components reveal the inner-workings of the simulation. Interactively filtered streamtubes colored orange when rising and blue when sinking represent the path of air through the storm. A swirling mass of red spheres in the low pressure tornado vortex delineates the developing tornado.

On the ground plane, tilting cones represent wind speed and direction. Colored by temperature, they show a surface boundary where warm and cold air interact at the tornado's base.

This visualization represents one hour of storm evolution. Large scale thunderstorm simulations have only recently produced small scale tornadic features as seen here.