Technology Trends and Challenges for Large-Scale Scientific Visualization

Scientific visualization is a key approach to understanding the growing massive streams of data from scientific simulations and experiments. In this article, I review technology trends including the positive effects of Moore's law on science, the significant gap between processing and data storage speeds, the emergence of hardware accelerators for ray-tracing, and the availability of robust machine learning techniques. These trends represent changes to the status quo and present the scientific visualization community with a new set of challenges. A major challenge involves extending our approaches to visualize the modern scientific process, which includes scientific verification and validation. Another key challenge to the community is the growing number, size, and complexity of scientific datasets. A final challenge is to take advantage of emerging technology trends in custom hardware and machine learning to significantly improve the large-scale data visualization process.

Lightning and Thunder: The Early Days of Interactive Information Visualization at the University of Maryland

The thrill of scientific discovery, the excitement of engineering development, and the fresh thinking of design explorations were invigorating as we participated in the birth of a new discipline: Information Visualization. This discipline, based on graphical user interfaces with pointing devices, became possible as software matured, hardware sped up, and screen resolution improved. Driven by the concepts of direct manipulation and dynamic queries, we made interactive interfaces that empowered users and opened up new possibilities for the next generation of designers. We worked with professionals who had real problems and tested real users to get their feedback. Some projects failed and some papers never got published, but many of the new ideas found their way into widely used commercial products. Our great satisfaction is that our students have spread the community spirit of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory as they continue to make further contributions.