A Grid Framework for Visualization Services in the Earth Sciences

Abstract

Scientific visualization is an ingredient essential to understanding the large amounts of data generated from large-scale numerical simulations, laboratory experiments and geological surveys. Visualization forms an integral component of any complete framework, together with services to handle mathematical and statistical analysis, storage, feature extraction, and other functions. To support rapid and seamless collaborations and communication between researchers across geographically disparate regions necessitates a distributed infrastructure that supports redundancy, fault tolerance, and most importantly, ease of use. We describe herein an architecture based on Naradabrokering, a publish/ subscribe framework that supports the above requirements. We have implemented an initial version of this architecture and describe some initial experiments.

Visualization of time-dependent dynamics of postglacial rebound

“…It is a commercial package available on many platforms, ranging from Linux and Microsoft Windows to Macintosh. The extensive set of easy-to-use features includes data imaging on the Cartesian, curvilinear and finite-element grids, scalar and vector field visualization algorithms, computation of iso-surfaces, direct volume rendering, time series manipulation, creating movies, support for the Tcl scripting language (http://www.tcl.tk), batch programming and remote data processing and remote visualization (see Erlebacher et al 2006). There is an active research front backing up Amira's constant advancement in visualization.…”

“…The phenomenon of viscous heating caused by tidal forcing was discussed by Prockter et al (2005). In this technically oriented paper, we will elaborate in greater details the entire procedure, which went into this visualization effort, in order for others to learn about the necessary know-how in utilizing this stateof-the-art system, which can also be implemented in the framework of a web service (Erlebacher et al 2006).…”

KWATT: a toolkit for automatic web service generation

“…The means to interact has been through external APIs, using remote procedure calls. More recently, the functionality of the Grid is available through a growing collection of web services [2,[12][13][14]. XMethods maintains a growing list of public web services.…”

“…Over the last several years, service-oriented architectures (SOA) 2 have emerged as a dominant paradigm to execute complex tasks across distributed networks 3 [9,10]. In these architectures, web service procedures wrap individual tasks that users invoke from remote locations.…”

“…As Earth Science simulations continue to expand with datasets of 1000 3 and beyond, data analysis and visualization have become pervasive [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Researchers have formed international teams that share ideas, collaborate on numerical and collaboratively analyze their data.…”