Pixel-Exact Rendering of Spacetime Finite Element Solutions

Computational simulation of time-varying physical processes is of fundamental importance for many scientific and engineering applications. Most frequently, time-varying simulations are performed over multiple spatial grids at discrete points in time. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to time-varying simulation: spacetime discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods. The result of this simulation method is a simplicial tessellation of spacetime with per-element polynomial solutions for physical quantities such as strain, stress, and velocity. To provide accurate visualizations of the resulting solutions, we have developed a method for per-pixel evaluation of solution data on the GPU. We demonstrate the importance of per-pixel rendering versus simple linear interpolation for producing high quality visualizations. We also show that our system can accommodate reasonably large datasets--spacetime meshes containing up to 20 million tetrahedra are not uncommon in this domain. CR ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VIS
• Authors: Michael Garland, Robert Haber, Yuan Zhou
• Keywords: Spacetime Discontinuous Galerkin, Time-varying Physical Processes, Time-varying Simulation, VIS 2004, Visualization