Loose capacity-constrained representatives for the qualitative visual analysis in molecular dynamics

Molecular dynamics is a widely used simulation technique to investigate material properties and structural changes under external forces. The availability of more powerful clusters and algorithms continues to increase the spatial and temporal extents of the simulation domain. This poses a particular challenge for the visualization of the underlying processes which might consist of millions of particles and thousands of time steps. Some application domains have developed special visual metaphors to only represent the relevant information of such data sets but these approaches typically require detailed domain knowledge that might not always be available or applicable. We propose a general technique that replaces the huge amount of simulated particles by a smaller set of representatives that are used for the visualization instead. The representatives capture the characteristics of the underlying particle density and exhibit coherency over time. We introduce loose capacity-constrained Vo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: APVIS
• Authors: Steffen Frey, Thomas Schlömer, Sebastian Grottel, Carsten Dachsbacher, Oliver Deussen, Thomas Ertl
• Keywords: APVIS 2011, Dynamical Systems Theory, Information Technology, Particle Density, Simulation Domain