Immersive Visualization of Supercomputer Applications: Exploring the End-to-end Lag of Diierent Applications

Virtual reality has been demonstrated to be very useful in the visualization of science and the synthesis of vast amounts of data Further advances in high speed networks make feasible the coupling of supercomputer simulations and virtual environments The critical performance issue to be addressed with this coupling is the end to end lag time i e the delay between a user input and the result of the input In this article we quantify the lag times for four di erent applications These applications range from coupling virtual environments with supercomputers to coupling multiple virtual environments for collaborative design The lag times for each application are given in terms of rendering network simulation tracking and synchronization times The results of the survey indicate that for some applications it is feasible in terms of lag times to couple supercomputers with virtual environments and to couple multiple virtual environments For the applications with intolerable lag times the simulation time dominates the lag time