Interactive Visualization in Large-scale, Distributed Computing Infrastructures with Gvk

Computational grids represent the latest approach to fulfill the demands of the scientific computing community in terms of processing speed and available memory. These large-scale, widely distributed computational infrastructures promise a powerful instrument for solving some of the largest available computational challenges. The complexity of the system is hidden by grid middleware software, which offers transparent services for resource sharing, scheduling, security, and coordination. A grid middleware approach for interactive, near real-time visualization is offered by the Grid Visualization Kernel GVK, which connects running applications to arbitrary visualization devices on the grid. GVK offers efficient and flexible transportation mechanisms between these endpoints, while using standard interfaces for connecting to scientific applications and output devices. With the available interfaces of GVK, grid-enabled applications may use traditional visualization toolkits as well as sophisticated virtual reality devices to present their results to the scientific user.