Scalable Grid Technologies for Visualization Services

72388-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 developed the computing infrastructure necessary to interface an open-source visualization toolkit to emerging Grid technologies. The infrastructure was demonstrated by developing three prototype Grid-enabled applications: an iso-surface generation service, a large-data rendering service, and a deformable image registration service. In Phase II, automation technologies will be developed to allow non-grid experts to contribute to this valuable resource, grid services will be created for large data volume rendering and visualization, and grid-based applications will be deployed for virtual microscopy and visualization of nuclear flash simulations. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by awardee: The commercial opportunity should be the sale and support of general software tools that greatly simplify the creation of grid services. Additional grid services (e.g., large volume visualization and high-performance, parallel visualization services), based on previous expertise in visualization and image analysis, also could be deployed.