Hardware-Accelerated Glyphs for Mono- and Dipoles in Molecular Dynamics Visualization

We present a novel visualization method for monoand dipolar molecular simulations from thermodynamics that takes advantage of modern graphics hardware to interactively render specifically tailored glyphs. Our approach allows domain experts to visualize the results of molecular dynamics simulations with a higher number of particles than before and furthermore offers much better visual quality. We achieve this by transferring only visualization parameters to the GPU and by generating implicit surfaces directly in the fragment program. As a result, we can render up to 500.000 glyphs with about 10 fps displaying all the simulation results as geometrical properties that resemble the classical abstract representation used in this research area. Thus we enable researchers to visually assess the results of simulations of greater scale than before. We believe that the proposed method can be generalized to create other kinds of parametrized surfaces directly on graphics hardware to overcome the bandwidth bottleneck that exists between CPU and GPU.