Distributed Visual Analytics on Large-Scale High-Resolution Displays

Abstract

Large-scale high-resolution displays are becoming increasingly available and have thus been the target of recent research. Such systems are usually driven by a graphics cluster, making software development a tedious endeavor; this might be the reason why it is uncommon to use them for interactive information visualization and visual analytics. However, this application area can particularly benefit from a large number of pixels. Therefore, we investigate distributed GPU-based rendering for visual analytics on a multi-tile large-scale display offering high resolution. We discuss conceptual differences and commonalities between information and scientific visualization on high-resolution displays. The requirements of high-resolution information visualization result in design choices for a software architecture for distributed GPU rendering. We illustrate our system for the example of a fractal tree visualization technique and report on performance characteristics and other experiences.