I am currently pursuing a second degree in the Department of Computer Science due to the excellent opportunity provided to LSU students to develop their own skill in the interdisciplinary field of physical sciences and computer science. This work is my system science design project as a requirement for the Master of System science in the Department of Computer Science at LSU.
3D visualization is a very important tool for scientific computing, for it provides scientists with the ability to visualize the output data, thus helps to diagnose and understand what is going on in the computation. In the field of computational astrophysics, huge amount of date are generated, typically several hundred giga-bytes each simulation, therefore, 3D visualization plays a very critical pole here. Most of the data generated in these simulations are very big density files, so one of the challenging tasks is to render the density contours out of the raw data, where the iso-surfacing method is widely used to find the vertices belonging to the same density level. Our work here is based upon the above philosophy, trying to use two different iso-surfacing method to pull out the vertices from the density files generated from one simulation of a rapidly rotating star, then make use of OPENGL (Open Graphic Library) to render the images and visualize them.
Powerpoint Presentation
The following are different frames from our final animation.