A movie is worth more than a million data points

Abstract

This paper describes a distributed visualization system called Spiegel, which displays and analyzes the results of N-body simulations. The result of a N-body simulation is an enormous amount of data consisting of information about how the bodies interact with each other over time. The analysis of this data is difficult because it is not always clear ahead of time what is important. The visualization system allows a user to explore the simulation by moving through time and space in a 3-dimensional environment. Because of its flexible architecture, the visualization system can be easily extended to add new features. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.