University Target Agreement "VisSim"

The Project:

In early 2005 the University  of Paderborn and the Ministery of Science of NRW signed a target agreement to support research projects and enable the university to form new, interdisciplinary facilities. Four different proposals were accepted. One of them is the project „VisSim“ which main focus lays on distributed visualization and simulation.

Our Mission:

The main competence of the PC², as a part of the VisSim group, is in High Performance Computing and Visualization. Therefore we develop concepts how to connect Simulation and Visualization efficiently and how to gain performance by distributing these tasks. In cooperation with the other members of the project VisSim (Research groups of Prof. Gausemeier, Prof. Meyer auf der Heide, Prof. Rammig, Prof. Wallascheck as well as C-Lab and L-Lab) we based our research on an existing application called Nightdriver. This is a driving simulator originally developed by the company Hella to realistically simulate new headlights which they develop. The second version of the Nightdriver was developed by Jan Bersenbrügge of the AG Gausemeier. Its main innovation is the utilization of programmable vertex and pixel shaders to improve realism and performance of the application. The next step is to take the application to more complex scenarios like multi-user support and to further increase performance by distributing visualization and simulation. This also brings along the need for remote availability of the service since not every potential user has the required computational power on his site. Therefore integration in the Grid environment is planned too.

One higher objective of the VisSim project is to generalize the results and conclusions gained through the sample application Nighdriver and use them for universal concepts in the field of distributed visualization and simulation on HPC systems. This enables new possibilities regarding interactive simulation of realistic events such as flow simulation, rapid prototyping or driving/flight simulations.

Funding:

Ministry of Innovation, Science, Research and Technology of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

Contact:

Stefan Lietsch