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Viewpoints: Hyperwall for the masses
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| Current NASA missions, instruments, and simulations produce so much data of such high dimensionality that they outstrip the capabilities of traditional visualization and analysis software. Hyperspectral images from satellites, multivariate data of high dimensionality from sky surveys, time-varying three-dimensional flows from supercomputer simulations, and complex inter-related time series from vehicle telemetry are but a few examples of these data.
The hyperwall, developed by the Computational Sciences Division at the NASA Ames Research Center, is a high-performance visualization cluster that was specifically designed to address this problem: Exploring, visualizing, and analyzing large, complex, multidimensional data. The hyperwall's capability represents a qualitative improvement over traditional approaches. But until now, this capability has required specialized hardware.
We propose to re-implement the technology of the hyperwall for general use: to create the necessary software, user interfaces and application programmer interfaces (APIs) so that hyperwall-like functionality is made available on an off-the-shelf high-end desktop workstation. We will apply this to a set of astrophysics and space science data analysis problems, and we will make the system available to the NASA and general scientific communities as open source. |
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