EPCC scientific visualisations to be presented at SC26
23 October 2026
EPCC will present two new scientific visualisations as part of 'Art in HPC', the international SC conference's showcase of these unique blends of science, computing and art. Here EPCC's Sébastien Lemaire explains how he created them.
Boiling the ocean... literally
This video came together after realising that earth science data could be made more tangible and potentially impactful by making the visualisation as realistic as possible. It shows ocean temperature anomalies over the last 45 years using data from the Copernicus project. Realism is enhanced through the use of satellite imagery, atmosphere properties, topography maps, and ray traced renders.
The Copernicus data was processed using xarray and Iris, and the final assembly, composition, shading were done in Blender, an open source 3D visualisation and animation software.
Colourful wind assistance
After several successful collaborations with Imperial College London, with both development and scientific visualisations (see our SC24 wind turbine video), this year we wanted to showcase the newly developed CFD solver x3d2 from the XCompact 3D framework. X3d2 is a high-order finite-difference incompressible-flow solver developed from the ground up with both CPU and GPU support.
The video shows the flow past two wing sails arranged in tandem, representative of wind-assisted propulsion devices. The simulation uses the immersed-boundary method to represent the foil geometry, together with non-periodic streamwise inflow/outflow boundary conditions and periodic transverse boundaries.
The calculation uses a uniform Cartesian mesh of approximately 381 million grid points. Based on the wing-sail chord and imposed inflow velocity, the Reynolds number is approximately 28,000. The case is an illustrative demonstration of the numerical methodology rather than a full-scale wing-sail prediction. Simulations were run in double precision on an NVIDIA Grace Hopper GH200 GPU using x3d2’s CUDA backend.
ParaView was used for the initial post-processing of the CFD simulation's velocity data to compute the Q-criterion, quantity highlighting vortices and showing the turbulent wake. The final video was made using Blender, this includes the ocean simulation, all the environment and elements present in the scene, but also the colour grading and editing of the video.
Further information
View our portfolio of scientific visualisations.
Please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss collaborations or to ask questions.
