Interactive visualization of the largest radioastronomy cubes
Abstract
3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool, however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26 GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework's performance. The framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time <0.3 s with 1024 × 1024 pixels output resolution using three rendering workstations and eight GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.
- Publication:
-
New Astronomy
- Pub Date:
- February 2011
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.newast.2010.07.009
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1008.0135
- Bibcode:
- 2011NewA...16..100H
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- Computer Science - Distributed;
- Parallel;
- and Cluster Computing
- E-Print:
- 15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted New Astronomy July 2010