Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes
arXiv:1008.0135 · doi:10.1016/j.newast.2010.07.009
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 second with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8 GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.
15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted New Astronomy July 2010
References in corpus (6)
- GASS: The Parkes Galactic All-Sky Survey. I. Survey Description, Goals, and Initial Data Release
- GAMER: a GPU-Accelerated Adaptive Mesh Refinement Code for Astrophysics
- Lossless Astronomical Image Compression and the Effects of Noise
- A GPU based real-time software correlation system for the Murchison Widefield Array prototype
- VisIVO - Integrated Tools and Services for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization
- GPU-Based Interactive Visualization of Billion Point Cosmological Simulations
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- Tera-scale Astronomical Data Analysis and Visualization
- A Distributed GPU-based Framework for real-time 3D Volume Rendering of Large Astronomical Data Cubes
- Real-time colouring and filtering with graphics shaders
- Rapid Development of Interferometric Software Using MIRIAD and Python
- Visualisation and Analysis Challenges for WALLABY