April 7, 2005, 10 am - 5 pm, at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA
in the West Building Seminar Room.

We will hold an informal one-day workshop, to discuss various issues in connection with visualization of simulations of dense stellar systems. This meeting will be of interest especially for astrophysicists working on these type of simulations, and computer scientists interested in applying visualization techniques to novel areas.

The fact that particles in dense stellar systems simulations have individual time steps already requires the development of special techniques to allow efficient and flexible rendering of orbits in movies and interactive graphic displays. In addition, when stars carry physical properties, such as temperature and luminosity, it is interesting to plot simultaneously orbital information as well as, say, a Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram and other physical diagnostics. This invites the development of an integrated visualization environment, taylored or at least adapted to simulations of dense stellar systems.

We will discuss the availability of existing packages, as well as plans for extending and adapting those packages. Specification of interfaces will be an important topic, as well as the general question of making N visualization packages and M simulation codes compatible in a way that requires N+M rather than N*M adjustments.

The meeting is open to all who are interested.
Some confirmed participants:

Hans-Peter Bischof
Toshi Fukushige
Douglas Heggie
Piet Hut
James Lombardie
Jun Makino
Ernest Mamikonyan
Steve McMillan
Peter Teuben
Enrico Vesperini

For further details, contact Piet Hut.

For more information about other MODEST workshops and activities, see the MODEST web site.