Visualization
The principal mission of ORNL’s Visualization Task Group is to help researchers gain a better understanding of their data through visualization techniques. We seek out and engage with projects at ORNL and with collaborators who might benefit from applying visual data understanding techniques to scientific data and to find ways of doing visualization that are different, are more effective, and better integrate with other research activities at ORNL.
Software
We use and support a wide variety of scientific visualization software, including VisIt, EnSight, POV-Ray, AVS/Express, ParaView, and IDL. Maya is used for advanced modeling. For wall delivery, Chromium is used to distribute OpenGL, while DMX is used to enable large-scale two-dimensional X11 graphics. We have custom solutions for delivering image and movie content to the EVEREST facility. Production tools such as AfterEffects, Photoshop, and Premier round out the tool kit, providing the tools for end-to-end delivery of high-quality visualizations.
We have a number of custom visualization solutions that we write and deploy as needed to solve specialized visualization needs. These custom solutions are tailored to each customer’s needs and may often be deployed in users’ offices as well as in EVEREST.
Support
ORNL has a dedicated visualization team to assist customers in solving visualization and data-interpretation issues. Support can range from assisting users in displaying data on the EVEREST PowerWall to writing custom visualization tools for specialized needs to producing production-quality images and movies for publications and public relations.
Some of our current customers include the Terascale Supernova Initiative, the Climate Dynamics Group, the Geographic Information Systems Group, the Center for Nanophase Material Science, and the LCF users at the NCCS.