Lots of people see the amazing videos of the creation of galaxies and starts and think they’re some fantastic conceptual animation done by great visual effects artists. In actuality, lots of them are created from actual computer simulation data by the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) who has been creating them since 1985, and has been featured in films like the recent IMAX “Hubble 3D”.
“Visualization is a supercomputing problem when you have terabytes of data,” says AVL Director Donna Cox. “A lot of places do not have the supercomputing power that we have, so we have focused on leveraging state of the art computer graphics tools and embedding them in a supercomputing environment where we can devote all these processors to the problems of visualization.”
