A Switching Mechanism of Visualization Middleware and Application Using Docker

Abstract

A Tiled Display Wall (TDW) is one of the visualization systems, which is appropriate for visualization of large-scale data. Although the scientific area needs an easier and cheaper TDW than the current one, a large-scale TDW is still too expensive to build individually. Given that, it is advisable to share the large-scale TDW among scientists who need to use it. To share a TDW, a variety of visualization middleware and applications should be installed on it because scientists use a different one of them depending on their data and purpose. However, there is a problem that it is difficult to coexist multiple visualization middleware and applications on a TDW because there are conflicts of library versions among them. To solve this problem, we propose a switching mechanism of visualization middleware and application using Docker. By using the proposed mechanism, administrators just need to deploy Docker images with visualization middleware and applications on a TDW, and then users can use them without the conflict problem. In the evaluation, the proposed mechanism is shown to have practically and scalability.