SAGE-based Tiled Display Wall enhanced with dynamic routing functionality triggered by user interaction

Abstract

To empower scientists who are engaged in nation-wide or global-scale collaborative projects for scientific discovery, a large amount of scientific data needs to be visualized and then shared among the scientists. Tiled Display Wall (TDW) has been widely accepted and used for visualization of large-scale scientific data. Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) has received attention from scientists as a middleware that organizes multiple display monitors into a network-aware large display monitor. Using a SAGE TDW, scientists can display multiple visualized contents on a single display monitor, each of which can be located at geographically distant site managed by other organizations. However, SAGE does not have a mechanism for managing multiple visualized data streams heading to a single TDW. In a conventional network, data flows for a same destination tend to share a same link, resulting in drop of packets and therefore poor visual quality. Moreover, because of the flexible nature of SAGE, rate of each visual data flow may change dynamically as a result of user interaction on a TDW, such as moving and resizing an application window. For the reason above, we propose and develop a dynamic route allocation method that switches packet flows onto network links where better performance is expected, in response to user interaction such as window movement and resizing. Technically, we have leveraged OpenFlow, an implementation of Software Defined Networking (SDN), to integrate network programmability into SAGE. In this paper, we show how SAGE enhanced with the proposed method succeeded in avoiding network congestion and improving the quality of visualization on the TDW over the wide area OpenFlow network on the Internet.