Interactive Visual Exploration of Unsteady 3D Flows

In this paper we present GPU-based techniques for the interactive visualization of large unsteady 3D flow fields on uniform grids. We propose a novel dual-core approach to asynchronously stream such fields from the CPU, thus enabling the efficient exploration of large time-resolved sequences. This approach decouples visualization from data handling, resulting in interactive frame rates. Built upon a previously published GPU particle engine for flow visualization we have developed new strategies to compute and to visualize path lines and streak lines on the GPU. To provide additional visual cues, focus+context techniques for polygonal meshes have been integrated. The proposed techniques are used in the visual analysis of the Terashake 2.1 earthquake simulation data, and they have been shown to be very effective in revealing the relevant information in this data.