Tele-Nicer-Slicer-Dicer: A New Tool for the Visualization of Large Volumetric Data

Tele-Nicer-Slicer-Dicer (TNSD) is a new tool for interactive visualization of large, rectilinear volumetric data. In addition to single volumes, TNSD can also process time series and multivariate data. TNSD is based on a client-server design where the client runs on one's local workstation and the server runs on the remote system where the data reside, typically a highperformance computer. The client side of TNSD features the ability to generate volume rendered or isosurface representations of data or a combination of the two techniques. The client makes heavy use of the graphics hardware of one's local workstation, in particular the transparency blending capability, to generate and animate images at relatively interactive rates. The prototype TNSD server satis es requests for data in les local to the server. In order to handle the larger data sets and to achieve a better balance in processing responsibilities between server and client, we have augmented the server with functions useful for preparing data for visualization. Current functionality includes operators for extracting a subvolume from a larger volume, resampling a volume at a lower resolution and computing derived values from multivariate data such as vector magnitude and curl.