Coherent Culling and Shading for Large Molecular Dynamics Visualization

Molecular dynamics simulations are a principal tool for studying molecular systems. Such simulations are used to investigate molecular structure, dynamics, and thermodynamical properties, as well as a replacement for, or complement to, costly and dangerous experiments. With the increasing availability of computational power the resulting data sets are becoming increasingly larger, and benchmarks indicate that the interactive visualization on desktop computers poses a challenge when rendering substantially more than millions of glyphs. Trading visual quality for rendering performance is a common approach when interactivity has to be guaranteed. In this paper we address both problems and present a method for high-quality visualization of massive molecular dynamics data sets. We employ several optimization strategies on different levels of granularity, such as data quantization, data caching in video memory, and a two-level occlusion culling strategy: coarse culling via hardware occlusio...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CGF
• Authors: Sebastian Grottel, Guido Reina, Carsten Dachsbacher, Thomas Ertl
• Keywords: CGF 2010, Data Sets, Molecular, Occlusion Culling Strategy