Greg Daues, Christopher Currie, Peter Anninos, Larissa Kohler, John Shalf, and Michael L. Norman (NCSA)
We are developing an interactive web-based computing environment to retrieve, analyse, and visualize archived data from very high resolution numerical simulations of an ensemble of X-ray clusters. The web interface is designed to support a large catalog of about 100 simulated clusters (roughly 100 GBytes of data) spanning several orders of magnitude in luminosity and binding mass. The software utilizes a Java layer to provide a user-friendly windowing environment on top of CGI scripts to regulate the remote access protocols, cluster specification, data transfer, data extraction, and the compilation, execution, and interactivity of various analysis routines. The visualization functions include 1D and 2D Java applets with support for animation, multiple colormapping, and feature zooming. In addition, 3D visualizations are achieved through a Java applet interface to produce VRML images of the dark matter particle distribution with weblinks to the simulated data for easy access, and to interactively generate VRML isosurface renderings of field quantities using the VTK software library.