The Black Holes Blue Waters Visualization Project

Jill Naiman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Black Holes Visualization is a project to produce a planetarium dome show on the formation, evolution, and influence of black holes in our universe. The project includes the development of software to expand visualization techniques of computational science to scientific stakeholders, graphic artists, and educators. The purpose of this Illinois Blue Waters (I-BW) allocation is to process visualizations of massive Blue Waters (BW) scientific datasets for inclusion in the Black Holes science outreach documentary and educational materials. This involves analyzing, designing,  and rendering high-resolution multi-format visualizations, including 4K fulldome for large-scale museums and high-definition (HD)/4K TV.

The challenge is to efficiently manage, visualize, and render large time-evolving data in high-resolution production quality for wide distribution. Working with these extremely large datasets requires more space, time, and processing power than we have locally. Processing or rendering a single data step may take hours, and it is not feasible to quickly iterate at these scales on our own local machines. Furthermore, when working with Blue Waters (BW) scientists, these BW simulation data are too massive to copy to ourlocal machines, so we request an  allocation to help provide BW scientists with access to visualization.  Our 2015-2019 BW allocations enabled successful explorations and renderings of BW data for
internationally distributed science documentaries. This proposal extends previous efforts to enable this effort that were delayed in the past year.