论文标题
浏览器中Terascale数据的交互式可视化:事实还是虚构?
Interactive Visualization of Terascale Data in the Browser: Fact or Fiction?
论文作者
论文摘要
信息可视化应用程序已无处不在,这在很大程度上要归功于Web浏览器启用的用户的广泛分发和部署。依靠本地代码库和并行处理的科学可视化应用程序不太适合这种广泛的分布,因为浏览器不提供所需的库或计算功能。在本文中,我们在可视化技术中重新审视了这一差距,并探讨了如何使用新的Web技术,WebAssembly和WebGPU来部署强大的可视化解决方案,以在浏览器中为大规模的科学数据提供强大的可视化解决方案。特别是,我们评估了通过这些技术将科学可视化应用程序带到浏览器并评估其对经典本地解决方案的竞争力所需的编程工作。作为一个主要示例,我们提出了用于块被压缩数据集的新的GPU驱动的等式提取方法,该方法适用于在资源受限环境(例如浏览器)中的大量卷上的交互式等速度计算。我们得出的结论是,Web浏览器即使是最苛刻的科学可视化任务,例如从1TB DNS模拟的Isosurfaces进行交互式可视化,即将成为竞争性平台。我们呼吁研究人员和开发人员考虑投资社区软件堆栈,以简化这些即将到来的浏览器功能,以将可访问的科学可视化带到浏览器。
Information visualization applications have become ubiquitous, in no small part thanks to the ease of wide distribution and deployment to users enabled by the web browser. Scientific visualization applications, relying on native code libraries and parallel processing, have been less suited to such widespread distribution, as browsers do not provide the required libraries or compute capabilities. In this paper, we revisit this gap in visualization technologies and explore how new web technologies, WebAssembly and WebGPU, can be used to deploy powerful visualization solutions for large-scale scientific data in the browser. In particular, we evaluate the programming effort required to bring scientific visualization applications to the browser through these technologies and assess their competitiveness against classic native solutions. As a main example, we present a new GPU-driven isosurface extraction method for block-compressed data sets, that is suitable for interactive isosurface computation on large volumes in resource-constrained environments, such as the browser. We conclude that web browsers are on the verge of becoming a competitive platform for even the most demanding scientific visualization tasks, such as interactive visualization of isosurfaces from a 1TB DNS simulation. We call on researchers and developers to consider investing in a community software stack to ease use of these upcoming browser features to bring accessible scientific visualization to the browser.