Case Study: Resource Steering in a Visualization System

Visual computational steering environments extend traditional visualization environments by enabling the user to interactively steer the computations applied to the data. In this paper, we develop a new type of computational steering. “Resource steering” extends current visual steering techniques by providing machine resource estimation and control to the user. With resource steering, the user controls the execution of the computation on a parallel or distributed computer based on experimentally or theoretically derived estimates of the parallel performance of the computation. We demonstrate this extended steering model by applying it to an information visualization system that analyzes genetic sequence similarity reports. We show how our extended steering model enhances the user’s ability to control visualization computations.