Scalable Devices - Scientific Visualization: Uncertainty, Multifield, Biomedical, and Scalable Visualization - page 342

Chapter 29
Scalable Devices

Jens Krüger and Markus Hadwiger

Abstract In computer science in general and in particular the field of high
performance computing and supercomputing the term scalable plays an important
role. It indicates that a piece of hardware, a concept, an algorithm, or an entire system
scales with the size of the problem, i.e., it can not only be used in a very specific
setting but it's applicable for a wide range of problems. From small scenarios to pos-
sibly very large settings. In this spirit, there exist a number of fixed areas of research
on scalability . There are works on scalable algorithms, scalable architectures but
what are scalable devices ? In the context of this chapter, we are interested in a whole
range of display devices, ranging from small scale hardware such as tablet comput-
ers, pads, smart-phones etc. up to large tiled display walls. What interests us mostly
is not so much the hardware setup but mostly the visualization algorithms behind
these display systems that scale from your average smart phone up to the largest
gigapixel display walls.

29.1 Introduction

In this chapter we will give an overview over the current state of the art of scalable
device visualization . Scalable device visualization for us, is a visualization software
and hardware setup that allows the efficient and effective visualization of—usually

( B )
Director Center of Visual Data Analysis and Computer Graphics - CoViDAG Professor of High
Performance Computing Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science,
University of Duisburg-Essen Lotharstraße 65, 47057 Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: [e-mail]
M. Hadwiger
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology,
Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
e-mail: [e-mail]

J. Krüger