KISTI uses Avizo Software to Visualize and Understand Simulation Data on VR Systems

By Jaesung Kim, Senior Researcher at Supercomputing Center (KSC)

Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is a government research institute for advanced R&D providing strategic information analysis, supercomputing and advanced information infrastructure to Korean researchers. KISTI is composed of three main centers: the Supercomputing Center (KSC), the Knowledge Information Center and the Information Analysis Center.

At KSC, the industrial supercomputing team is dedicated to collaborate with Korean companies, especially small and medium-sized business (SMB), by providing them with supercomputing technologies and infrastructures. The main goals of the team are to support supercomputing based simulation technologies to Korean SMBs and to develop advanced product development environment for the Korean industry.

Since 2007, this team has supported around 150 SMBs and has reduced their product development time and cost of 50% by applying simulation technologies (CFD/CAE) on the supercomputer. This team has developed LARD (Large-scale Realistic Design) environment which can provide realistic design and simulation to substitute physical design/experiments activities into virtual design/experiment activities.

The aim of LARD project is the development of design and simulation environment closest to the real world. This imposes large-scale data processing, large-scale simulation, VR/AR and photo-realistic rendering technologies. In this project, the team also tries to integrate design activities such as digital mockup (DMU), product styling (conceptual design) with simulation activities in a virtual reality environment for the seamless product design and simulation.
The KSC team has selected Avizo software for the LARD environment development. Avizo software is the ideal software for 3D visualization and analysis of simulation data and is the perfect tool for the visualization on immersive VR systems and large multi-screen configurations. More than a simple application, Avizo is a 3D software framework, which makes customization and in-house development possible. This has been really useful for the KSC team. KSC also deployed DirectViz, a powerful extension providing real-time realistic 3D rendering.

"Avizo provides high-performance visualization capabilities for simulation post-processing on VR-based systems" says Jaesung Kim, Senior Researcher at Supercomputing Center (KSC). Avizo software's visualization of numerical simulation results is outstanding compared to similar software tools on the market. Furthermore, its extendable capabilities allow us to customize it to perfectly fit our own needs."

"The Avizo software tools are very suitable to our visualization system named "Picasso". Picasso system has a wide screen (8m x 2.5m) composed of 16 display channels and 872 computation cores. Avizo provides very easy configuration schemes for the multi-screen display, while DirectViz easily supports the use of multicore architecture, delivering high visualization performance."

The KSC team plans to add simulation functionality to control simulation solvers (Ansys, Fluent, CFX) in Avizo's VR environment. In addition, the KSC team hopes to develop a mixed rendering functionality to visualize simulation results and realistic rendering images together.

Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is a government research institute for advanced R&D providing strategic information analysis, supercomputing and advanced information infrastructure to Korean researchers.

About Amira & Avizo 3D Software

Amira and Avizo are high-performance 3D software for visualizing, analyzing, and understanding scientific and industrial data coming from all types of sources and modalities.

_{Images and text are courtesy of KISTI.}