Multiresolution visualization of massive black oil reservoir models.

Recent advances in parallel architectures for numerical simulation of natural black oil reservoirs have allowed the use of very discretized domains. As a consequence, these simulations produce an unprecedented volume of data, which must be visualized in 3D environments for careful analysis and inspection. Conventional scientific visualization techniques are not viable on such large models, creating a demand for the development of scalable visualization solutions. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical multiresolution technique to render massively large black oil reservoir meshes. A new simplification algorithm specialized for such models is presented, which accurately represents boundary surfaces, while keeping the hexahedral mesh with good quality. Original model properties, wireframe and surface normals are mapped onto the simplified meshes through texture mapping. This allows the system to reuse the structure for different simulations that use the same geometry model. The viewer application is designed to guarantee a minimum refresh rate, allocating geometric detail where it is most needed, given the available hardware. Experimental results, considering up to 1.2 billion cell models, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]