Abstract
One of the challenges in scientific visualization is to generate software libraries suitable for the large-scale data emerging from tera-scale simulations and instruments. We describe the efforts currently under way at SDSC and NPACI to address these challenges.
The scope of the SDSC project spans data handling, graphics, visualization, and scientific application domains Components of the research focus on the following areas: intelligent data storage, layout and handling, using an associated “Floor-Plan” (meta data); performance optimization on parallel architectures; extension of SDSC’s scalable, parallel, direct volume renderer to allow perspective viewing; and interactive rendering of fractional images (“imagelets”), which facilitates the examination of large datasets.
These concepts are coordinated within a data-visualization pipeline, which operates on component data blocks sized to fit within the available computing resources. A key feature of the scheme is that the meta data, which tag the data blocks, can be propagated and applied consistently. This is possible at the disk level, in distributing the computations across parallel processors; in “imagelet” composition; and in feature tagging.
The work reflects the emerging challenges and opportunities presented by the ongoing progress in high-performance computing (HPC) and the deployment of the data, computational, and visualization Grids.
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Pailthorpe, B.A., Bordes, N. (2000). Scalable Visualization of Galaxies, Oceans, and Brains. In: Engquist, B., Johnsson, L., Hammill, M., Short, F. (eds) Simulation and Visualization on the Grid. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 13. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57313-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57313-2_14
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