A scientific visualization workbench

A system for visualization of data from supercomputer simulations has been developed for use by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The scientific visualization workbench, as the system is called, is based on an industry standard workstation (a Sun 3/160C), the NeWS window system, and a video/graphics add-in card, which is supported by NeWS. Also involved is a frame buffer attached to a 48-Mbit/s Cray channel and a video link from the frame buffer to the Sun workstation. Computation and graphics preparation are performed on the Cray under the control of a NeWS client program. Images are rasterized and sent to the workstation at the rate of 25 frames/s. The workbench permits the scientist to converse with applications running on a Cray but still retain the convenience and flexibility of a personal workstation environment. Moreover, the video link allows animated graphics images to be displayed on the workstation at a much higher rate than would be possible with a conventional network connection, i.e., Ethernet. Also, NeWS affords the convenience of a modern window system. Live video can be displayed in a window anywhere on the screen, while other windows may contain conventional text or graphics.