With the Cluster of Excellence in Simulation Technology (SimTech), the University of Stuttgart successfully contributes to the excellence initiative funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Being funded since 2008, the cluster currently applies for an extension to the next round of the excellence initiative. Numerical simulation is an important tool in research as well as in applications of industry. They can replace or facilitate complex, and expensive, or infeasible, real world experiments. With more than 50 projects, a large number of institutes of the University of Stuttgart contribute to SimTech. The potential of the cluster in particular lies in the tight interdisciplinary cooperation of the projects, the active exchange of knowledge between the disciplines, and the resulting synergy effects. The joint research effort of SimTech leads to the development of new approaches making numerical simulation more efficient, robust, and applicable in novel, complex scenarios. A primary goal of the cluster of excellence is the fusion of the separate strategies and concepts of the participating disciplines, yielding a new kind of integrated simulation environment. Interactive visualization plays an important role in such an environment. It alleviates and facilitates the analysis of the huge amount of data generated by the numerical simulations.

VISUS contributes to SimTech with three distinct projects in the field of scientific visualization and computer graphics. The PhD students working on the projects are tightly integrated into SimTech, e.g., through the membership in the SimTech graduate school, improving interdisciplinary cooperation and research. Moreover, further VISUS researchers, which are not directly funded by SimTech, are members of the graduate school, allowing them to benefit from the interdisciplinary environment, as well as to contribute to it.

One project (project coordinator: Prof. Dr. Thomas Ertl, research associate: Dipl.-Inf. Markus Üffinger) researches new visualization techniques for data generated by multi-scale and multi-physics simulations. Another important aspect is the development of efficient interfaces for tight coupling of numerical simulation software and interactive visualization tools.
The second SimTech project „Visualization for integrated simulation systems“ (project coordinator: Prof. Dr. Daniel Weiskopf, research associate: Dipl.-Inf. Marcel Hlawatsch) concentrates on modular visualization methods that build upon work flow technology. The development of new visualization techniques for complex data from numerical simulation is also part of the project, e.g., visualization of data and systems with uncertainty information. Dipl.-Phys. Gregor Mückl works on a third SimTech project dealing with the simulation of light and sound propagation in complex environments (project coordinator: Juniorprof. Dr. Carsten Dachsbacher). Furthermore, he develops a framework which harnesses the computational power of modern graphics processing hardware to speed up his complex simulations.