Distributed interactive graphics applications in computational fluid dynamics

Implementation of two interactive, distributed graphics programs used in Computational Fluid Dynamics is discussed. Both programs run on a Cray 2 supercomputer and use a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation as the graphics front-end machine. The hardware and supporting software is from the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation project. Using this configuration, the supercomputer does all of the numerically intensive work and the workstation allows the user to perform real-time interactive transformations on the displayed data. The first program was written originally as a distributed program which computes particle traces for fluid flow solutions existing on the supercomputer. The second is an older post-processing and plotting program which was modified to run in a distributed mode. Both programs have realized a large increase in capability as a distributed process. Some graphical results are presented.