Visualization Tools for Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) is a highly effective method for simulations that span a large range of spatiotemporal scales, such as astrophysical simulations that must accommodate ranges from interstellar to sub-planetary. Most mainstream visualization tools still lack support for AMR as a first class data type and AMR code teams use custom built applications for AMR visualization. The Department of Energy's (DOE's) Science Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET) is currently working on extending VisIt, which is an open source visualization tool that accommodates AMR as a first-class data type. These efforts will bridge the gap between general-purpose visualization applications and highly specialized AMR visual analysis applications. Here, we give an overview of the state of the art in AMR visualization research and tools and describe how VisIt currently handles AMR data