Terapixel imaging of cosmological simulations

Abstract

The increasing size of cosmological simulations has led to the need for new visualization techniques. We focus on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamical (SPH) simulations run with the GADGET code and describe methods for visually accessing the entire simulation at full resolution. The simulation snapshots are rastered and processed on supercomputers into images that are ready to be accessed through a web interface (GigaPan). This allows any scientist with a web-browser to interactively explore simulation datasets in both in spatial and temporal dimensions, datasets which in their native format can be hundreds of terabytes in size or more. We present two examples, the first a static terapixel image of the MassiveBlack simulation, a P-GADGET SPH simulation with 65 billion particles, and the second an interactively zoomable animation of a different simulation with more than one thousand frames, each a gigapixel in size. Both are available for public access through the GigaPan web interface. We also make our imaging software publicly available.

9 pages, 6 figures, Link to the Gigapan image: http://gigapan.org/gigapans/76215/ Link to the TimeMachine animation: http://timemachine.gigapan.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_Universe Link to Gaepsi: http://web.phys.cmu.edu/~yfeng1/gaepsi

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The MassiveBlack-II Simulation: The Evolution of Halos and Galaxies to z~0
• Cold flows and the first quasars
• The BlueTides Simulation: First Galaxies and Reionization
• High redshift supermassive blackholes: accretion through cold flows
• Visualizing Astronomical Data with Blender
• Growth of Early Supermassive Black Holes and the High-Redshift Eddington Ratio Distribution
• Growth and anisotropy of ionization fronts near high redshift quasars in the MassiveBlack simulation