Abstract:
In the last decades cosmological N-body dark matter simulations have enabled
ab initio studies of the formation of structure in the Universe. Gravity
amplified small density fluctuations generated shortly after the Big Bang,
leading to the formation of galaxies in the cosmic web. These calculations
have led to a growing demand for methods to analyze time-dependent particle
based simulations. Rendering methods for such N-body simulation data usually
employ some kind of splatting approach via point based rendering primitives
and approximate the spatial distributions of physical quantities using kernel
interpolation techniques, common in SPH (Smoothed Particle
Hydrodynamics)-codes. This paper proposes three GPU-assisted rendering
approaches, based on a new, more accurate method to compute the physical
densities of dark matter simulation data. It uses full phase-space
information to generate a tetrahedral tessellation of the computational
domain, with mesh vertices defined by the simulation's dark matter particle
positions. Over time the mesh is deformed by gravitational forces, causing
the tetrahedral cells to warp and overlap. The new methods are well suited to
visualize the cosmic web. In particular they preserve caustics, regions of
high density that emerge, when several streams of dark matter particles share
the same location in space, indicating the formation of structures like
sheets, filaments and halos. We demonstrate the superior image quality of the
new approaches in a comparison with three standard rendering techniques for
N-body simulation data.