Interactive texture-based volume rendering for large data sets

Visualization is an integral part of scientific computation and simulation. State-of-the-art simulations of physical systems can generate terabytes to petabytes of time-varying data where a single time step can contain more than a gigabyte of data per variable. As memory sizes continue to increase, the size of data sets will likely increase at a comparably high rate. The key to understanding this data is visualizing the global and local relationships of data elements. Direct volume rendering is an excellent method for examining these properties. It lets each data element contribute to the final image and allows querying of the spatial relationship of data elements and their quantitative relationships.