A distributed execution environment for large data visualization

Over the years, homogeneous computer cluster have been the most popular, and, in some sense, the only viable, platform for use in parallel visualization. In this work, we designed an execution environment for data-intensive visualization that is suitable to handle SciDAC scale datasets. This environment is solely based on computers distributed across the Internet that are owned and operated by independent institutions, while being openly shared for free. Those Internet computers are inherently of heterogeneous hardware configuration and running a variety of operating systems. Using 100 processors of such kind, we have been able to obtain the same level of performance offered by a 64-node cluster of 2.2 GHz P4 processors, while processing a 75GBs subset of TSI simulation data. Due to its inherently shared nature, this execution environment for data-intensive visualization could provide a viable means of collaboration among geographically separated SciDAC scientists.