The IRIDIUM Project: Post-Processing and Distributed Graphics

Abstract

This paper presents one of the latest project in scientific visualization undertaken by the Direction des Etudes et Recherches, the research and development department of Electricite de France, the French national electricity company. The aims of this project, called Iridium, are to develop a new post-processing tool for visualization in fluid dynamics and more generally to investigate how to take advantage of cooperative architectures including supercomputers and graphics workstations to achieve more powerful systems in the scientific area. The development of the post-processor itself will be the first experiment in which we will be involved in distributing software and we hope that it will be helpful for further applications. We maintain that distributing a scientific application on a supercomputer and one or more workstation connected together through a high speed network ideally responds to the requirements of scientific visualization.