An intuitive means of controlling numerical simulations can be achieved by integrating virtual environments with High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The Cosmic Worm is an HPC visualization tool which runs in the CAVE virtual reality theater. It is desinged to visualize the three-dimensional output from a numerical simulation while giving a scientist interactive control of that simulation from within a virutal environment. It is being developed in collaboration with the Astrophysics and Gravitation groups at the Natonal Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Both groups are finding this to be a valuable research tool in their studies of cosmic phenomena. For the first time they have the ability to steer their three-dimensional simulations, and visualization, and the CAVE has enabled them to see aspects of the data which had not appeared in standard workstation visualizations.

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Roy, T., DeFanti, T., Interactive Visualization in a High Performance Computing Virtual Environment, Proceedings of the 1995 Simulation Multiconference, The Society for Computer Simulation, pp. 471-476, A.M. Turner (Ed.), January 1st, 1995.