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arXiv · 1008.0135

Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes

A. H. Hassan·C. J. Fluke·D. G. Barnes
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Abstract

3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool, however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26 GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework's performance. The framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time < 0.3 second with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8 GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.

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A. H. Hassan, C. J. Fluke, D. G. Barnes. 2010-08-01. Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newast.2010.07.009

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