Visual interrogation of gyrokinetic particle simulations

Gyrokinetic particle simulations are critical to the study of anomalous energy transport associated with plasma microturbulence in magnetic confinement fusion experiments. The simulations are conducted on massively parallel computers and produce large quantities of particles, variables, and time steps, thus presenting a formidable challenge to data analysis tasks. We present two new visualization techniques for scientists to improve their understanding of the time-varying, multivariate particle data. One technique allows scientists to examine correlations in multivariate particle data with tightly coupled views of the data in both physical space and variable space, and to visually identify and track features of interest. The second technique, built into SCIRun, allows scientists to perform range-based queries over a series of time slices and visualize the resulting particles using glyphs. The ability to navigate the multiple dimensions of the particle data, as well as query individual or a collection of particles, enables scientists to not only validate their simulations but also discover new phenomena in their data.