Large multidimensional data visualization for materials science

Abstract

Copublished by the IEEE CS and the AIP Materials scientists use scientific visualization to explore very large multidimensional data sets. The Atomsviewer visualization system enables telepresence and provides multimodal views of simulation data.

Visualization in Materials Research

“…Our focus in this chapter, however, is on methodologies that extend the graphics capabilities and that provide an interactive experience for the user, which we feel is critical for enabling the researcher to best understand the information inherent in their data. We will use three examples to illustrate these points: The analysis of SIMS data (Reichenbach et al, 2011), a recent study of visualization of atom-probe tomography data (Bryden et al, 2013), and the use of visualization in analyzing simulations (Bryden et al, 2012;Sharma et al, 2003).…”

“…We note that occlusion is just one example of the issues remaining to be addressed to move the state of scientific visualization forward. Those challenges and issues are addressed in much more detail elsewhere (Johnson, 2004;Sharma et al, 2003).…”

“…As in the APT data, occlusion by other atoms makes identification of any defects quite challenging. Various aspects of how one can alleviate this problem are discussed in Sharma et al (2003).…”

“…To understand this data requires a combination of analysis tools, in which visualization plays a number of critical roles. In this chapter we focus on two of these: Data, or information, visualization that can apply to experimental, modeling, and simulation-based data (Zhu and Chen, 2005); and visualization of discrete structures, including atomic positions (Sharma et al, 2003) and defect microstructures (Kra et al, 2000), obtained experimentally or through simulations. The visualization of discrete structures falls into the general category that is often referred to as scientific visualization (Zhu and Chen, 2005).…”

“…Examples of scientific visualization are quite varied, with examples from many disparate fields. In materials research, the large numbers of entities make the visualization quite challenging, for example the hundreds of millions of atomic positions from large-scale atomistic simulations (Sharma et al, 2003).…”