Case study: mantle convection visualization on the Cray T3D

The recent years have seen rapid advancement towards viewing the Earth as an integrated system. This means that we have come to understand the interdependence of the major planetary subsystems-atmosphere, biosphere, oceans and the deep earth interior-on a large range of time and length scales. One of the longest time scales of the planet is imposed by solid state convection within the silicate Earth mantle. Mantle convection modeling, and other earth science modeling efforts, now are producing simulation data on grids that are large enough to strain the memory and processing power of even the largest high-end graphics workstations. Another alternative is to use parallel visualization tools running on the massively parallel computers that generated the data. This is the approach that we have taken for the visualization of mantle convection simulation data.