Immersive and Interactive Exploration of Billion-Atom Systems

We have developed a visualization system, named Atomsviewer, to render a billion atoms from the results of a molecular dynamics simulation. This system uses a hierarchical view frustum culling algorithm based on the octree data structure to ef ciently remove atoms that are outside of the eld of view. A novel occlusion culling algorithm, using a probability function, then selects atoms with a high probability of being visible. These selected atoms are further tested with a traditional occlusion culling algorithm before being rendered as spheres at varying levels of detail. To achieve scalability, Atomsviewer is distributed over a cluster of PCs that execute a parallelized version of the hierarchical view frustum culling and the probabilistic occlusion culling, and a graphics workstation that renders the atoms. We have used Atomsviewer to render a billion-atom data set on a dual processor SGI Onyx2 with an In niteReality2 graphics pipeline connected to a four-node PC cluster.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: VR
• Authors: Ashish Sharma, Xinlian Liu, Paul Miller, Aiichiro Nakano, Rajiv K. Kalia, Priya Vashishta, Wei Zhao, Timothy Campbell, Andy Haas
• Keywords: Culling, Hierarchical View Frustum, Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Virtual Reality, VR 2002