Visualization Research at Grumman's Computer Applications Laboratory (CAL)

A Computer Applications Laboratory (CAL) has been established at Grumman that is primarily concerned with the visualization of large sets of scientific data. The laboratory is a color graphics workstation environment and communications facility that allows scientists and engineers to quickly process and visualize large quantities of discrete data generated by an experiment or by a supercomputer numerical simulation. The graphical visualization capabilities are supported by in-house research into software development tailored to specific workstation hardware graphics. The CAL facility also serves as a site to the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC) allowing scientists, whose computer requirements involve massive physical memory, to access the CRAY-2. This paper describes the hardware and communications composition of the laboratory and its ongoing software graphics and scientific visualization research, with several examples of its graphical output and visualization capabilities.