Scientific Visualisation (P00284)

? Credit Points : 10 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : PHY-P-HPCSciVis

The Scientific Visualisation course is an introductory course based on the package AVS Vis/Express and the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK). The course will be organised in three stages.

Stage 1: Introduction to AVS Vis/Express: this stage will focus on demonstrating the importance of scientific visualisation for both data analysis and scientific presentation, and on providing an overview of the concepts implemented by this class of packages. The basic knowledge acquired over this introduction will then be used to experiment with mainstream visualisation techniques (mostly volume and vector visualisation).

Stage 2: Advanced AVS Vis/Express: this second stage will provide an overview of how to overcome some of the limitations of this package-oriented approach by developing new modules and extending the functionality of existing ones. This stage will be concluded by a case study for which students will choose one of three case-studies, all based on real scientific problems. They will be provided with a description of the scientific problem under consideration and features they have to visualise, along with the associated data sets. These case studies will ensure that students can exploit the knowledge acquired since the start of the course in a creative and coherent fashion.
Stage 3: Introduction to the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK): this final stage will provide an introduction to VTK, illustrating how the approach taken by VTK differs from that of AVS. Basic examples of volume and vector visualisation of scientific data will be used to illustrate this point.

Entry Requirements

? Pre-requisites : Only postgraduates or final year MPhys students with suitable computational background, subject to space restrictions and agreement with relevant Programme Coordinator.

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Postgraduate (School of Physics), (School of Physics, Schedule Q)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : Not being delivered

? Contact Teaching Time : 3 hour(s) per week for 10 weeks

All of the following classes

Type	Day	Start	End	Area
Lecture	Tuesday	09:00	13:00	KB

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

On completion of this course students should be able to:

- understand the aims and benefits of scientific visualisation for data analysis and scientific presentations;
- explain the concepts on which modular visualisation packages such as AVS Vis/Express are based;
- list the range of mainstream visualisation techniques available to them;
- know the advantages, disadvantages and limitations of the techniques and how best to utilise each in practice;
- use AVS Vis/Express to implement all the above-mentioned techniques;
- extend AVS Vis/Express functionality by developing their own modules using the C programming language;
- use VTK for basic visualisation (volume and vector visualisation) of scientific data;
- understand the advantages and limitations of AVS Vis/Express vs. VTK.