Scalable Grid Technologies for Visualization Services

72388S03-I Large-scale computing is increasingly a distributed activity. Expensive and specialized resources ¿ whether they are supercomputers, scientific instrumentation, visualization devices, collaboration facilities, or personnel ¿ are distributed geographically and across organizations. Grid services are a natural means to provide such specialized capabilities between collaborating enterprises. Based on scalable visualization technology in existing software libraries, this project will organize selected technologies into a service that provides these specialized capabilities to multiple Web clients. These services must be adapted to standard protocols to provide the appropriate quality of service that addresses the requirements on performance, security, and accounting. Phase I will develop the computing infrastructure necessary to interface an open-source visualization toolkit to emerging Grid technologies. This infrastructure will be demonstrated by developing three prototype Grid-enabled applications: an iso-surface generation service, a large-data rendering service, and a deformable image registration service. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by awardee: The commercial opportunity is the provision of Grid services for visualization, rendering, segmentation, and registration based on open-source VTK (visualization) and ITK (segmentation and registration) products. These services would be offered on a pay-for-use basis, or licensed to organizations desiring to use the technology in their applications.