Modern astrophysics and cosmology are limited not by the ability to produce data, but by the ability to understand it. Within ICSC Spoke 3, the growing complexity of data from massive simulations and large-scale observational campaigns requires powerful visualization tools to extract scientific insights — visualization is a primary instrument of discovery, not an accessory.
Petabyte-scale data volumes are generated by observations and simulations, from cosmological and MHD runs on (pre-)Exascale HPC systems (e.g. GADGET, PLUTO) to large surveys and SKA precursors: multi-variate catalogues, volumetric grids and spectral cubes at resolutions exceeding any single workstation.
VisIVOLab, INAF’s Visualization and Data Analytics Competence Center, provides the Spoke’s core visualization expertise. Building on the VisIVO toolchain, it delivers high-performance visualization pipelines on HPC and cloud infrastructures — Jupyter-based interactive access, GPU-accelerated volume rendering and immersive VR — turning massive raw outputs into interpretable, interactive representations that accelerate discovery.