Publications

L. A. Freitag and R. M. Loy, "Using Desktop Graphics Workstations for Interactive Remote Exploration of Large Data Sets," Preprint ANL/MCS-P809-0400, April 2000.

The interactive visualization and exploration of large scientific data sets is a challenging and difficult task; their size often far exceeds the performance and memory capacity of even the most powerful graphics workstations. To address this problem, we have created a technique that combines multiresolution data reduction methods with parallel computing to allow interactive exploration of large data sets while retaining full-resolution capability. We describe the creation of reduced data sets using several different criteria including user-specified error bounds or a preset performance criterion. We discuss the software architecture of the system with particular emphasis on the algorithms used to efficiently create a reduced data set and the software used to communicate between the remote data reduction server and the local graphics client. We present performance results for the visualization of Rayleigh-Taylor instability and hairpin vortex data sets.