Abstract:
Despite the ongoing efforts in turbulence research, the universal properties
of the turbulence small-scale structure and the relationships between small-
and large-scale turbulent motions are not yet fully understood. The visually
guided exploration of turbulence features, including the interactive
selection and simultaneous visualization of multiple features, can further
progress our understanding of turbulence. Accomplishing this task for flow
fields in which the full turbulence spectrum is well resolved is challenging
on desktop computers. This is due to the extreme resolution of such fields,
requiring memory and bandwidth capacities going beyond what is currently
available. To overcome these limitations, we present a GPU system for
feature-based turbulence visualization that works on a compressed flow field
representation. We use a wavelet-based compression scheme including
run-length and entropy encoding, which can be decoded on the GPU and embedded
into brick-based volume ray-casting. This enables a drastic reduction of the
data to be streamed from disk to GPU memory. Our system derives turbulence
properties directly from the velocity gradient tensor, and it either renders
these properties in turn or generates and renders scalar feature volumes. The
quality and efficiency of the system is demonstrated in the visualization of
two unsteady turbulence simulations, each comprising a spatio-temporal
resolution of 10244. On a desktop computer, the system can visualize each
time step in 5 seconds, and it achieves about three times this rate for the
visualization of a scalar feature volume.