Visualizing astrophysics simulations: new results of the COAST project

Abstract

The COAST project at CEA/IRFU at Saclay involves astrophysicists and software engineers developing simulation codes in magneto-hydrodynamics and generic tools for data structuration and visualization. Thanks to the new generation of massively parallel mainframes, computing in astrophysics had made huge progress, generating more complexity and much bigger size of numerical simulations. Two software tools have been developed at IRFU for the visualization of massive amounts of data produced by these simulation codes. SDvision is a code deployed in the framework of IDL Object Graphics, to process all results from different simulation codes developed by astrophysicists. PyMSES is a set of Python modules especially optimized for visualizing the complex data produced by our AMR simulation code RAMSES. These codes are suitable for interactive and immersive navigation for the analysis of 3D results and also for videos and stereoscopic movies productions for people at large. In this paper, we present visualizations of recent numerical simulations in astrophysics, more specifically in the domain of Interstellar Medium and Galaxies Formation.