Visapult - Using High-Speed WANs and Network Data Caches to Enable Remote and Distributed Visualization
W. Bethel, J. Shalf, S. Lau
Visualization Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

D. Gunter, J. Lee, B. Tierney
Data Intensive and Distributed Computing Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

V. Beckner
Center for Compuatational Sciences and Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

J. Brandt, D. Evensky, H. Chen
Networking Security and Research, Sandia National Laboratory

G. Pavel, J. Olsen, B.H. Bodtker
Advanced Communications and Signal Processing Group, Electronics Engineering Technologies Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Description:
Visapult is a prototype application and framework for remote visualization of large scientific datasets. We approach the technical challenges of tera-scale visualization with a unique architecture that employs high speed WANs and network data caches for data staging and transmission. High throughput rates are achieved by parallelizing i/o at each stage in the application, and by pipelining the visualization process. Visapult consists of two components; a viewer and a back end. The back end is a parallel application that loads in large scientific data sets using a domain decomposition, and performs software volume rendering on each subdomain, producing an image. The viewer, also a parallel application, implements.  Image Based Rendering Assisted Volume Rendering using the
imagery produced by the back end.

On the display device, graphics interactivity is effectively decoupled from the latency inherent in network applications.  This submission seeks to make two high-water marks: remote visualization of a dataset that exceeds 1TB in size, and application performance that will exceed 1.5Gb/s in sustained network bandwidth consumption.

Further project information and graphics is available bia http://vis.lbl.gov/projects/visapult