Visual Supercomputing: Technologies, Applications and Challenges

Abstract

If we were to have a Grid infrastructure for visualization, what technologies would be needed to build such an infrastructure, what kind of applications would benefit from it, and what challenges are we facing in order to accomplish this goal? In this survey paper, we make use of the term 'visual supercomputing' to encapsulate a subject domain concerning the infrastructural technology for visualization. We consider a broad range of scientific and technological advances in computer graphics and visualization, which are relevant to visual supercomputing.We identify the state-of-the-art technologies that have prepared us for building such an infrastructure. We examine a collection of applications that would benefit enormously from such an infrastructure, and discuss their technical requirements. We propose a set of challenges that may guide our strategic efforts in the coming years.

Distributed Collaborative Visualization Using Light Field Rendering

“…Visualization systems that are truly distributed and support generalized rendering (such as RAVE [13]) have issues with scaling beyond a few users or scaling to support large sized datasets. Further details of the existing visualizations system are presented in the visualization taxonomy [16] and in Brodlie et al [17].…”

The importance of locality in the visualization of large datasets

“…A successful example of such an approach is the TeraGyroid collaboration between the U.K. Level 2 Grid and the U.S. TeraGrid [10]: computations were run on a transatlantic Grid and specialist visualization facilities at Argonne, Manchester, UCL and Phoenix were used in a workshop viewed by sites across the world via the integration with the Access Grid advanced videoconferencing technology. This demonstrates the potential of utilizing Grid approaches for visualization (for a recent summary of the state of the art in this field see [11]). There are also currently several other architectural approaches to the problem of harnessing the power of Grid computing for the purposes of visualization.…”

Parallel and Distributed Visualization: The State of the Art

“…A future visual supercomputing infrastructure should be based on all personal computers, either loosely or tightly connected [Bro05]. The latest generations of commodity graphics cards, such as the NVidia GeForce and ATI Radeon families, are allowing more and more applications to take advantage of graphics hardware.…”

“…The computer graphics and visualization community has been seeking for high-performance computing, and has accumulated large volumes of research outputs in parallel, distributed, and web-based techniques for visualization. The community has shown equally great enthusiasm to embrace the cluster, Grid and mobile technologies [Bro05].…”