Pipelining parallel image compositing and delivery for efficient remote visualization

Scientific datasets of large volumes generated by next-generation computational sciences need to be transferred and processed for remote visualization and distributed collaboration among a geographically dispersed team of scientists. Parallel visualization using high-performance computing facilities is a typical approach to processing such increasingly large datasets. We propose an optimized image compositing scheme with linear pipeline and adaptive transport to support efficient image delivery to a remote client. The proposed scheme arranges an arbitrary number of parallel processors within a cluster in a linear order and divides the image into a carefully selected number of segments, which flow through the linear in-cluster pipeline and wide-area networks to the remote client consecutively. We analytically determine the segment size that minimizes the final image display time and derive the conditions where the proposed image compositing and delivery scheme outperforms the traditional schemes including the binary swap algorithm. In order to match the transport throughput for image delivery over wide-area networks to the pipelining rate for image compositing within the cluster, we design a class of transport protocols using stochastic approximation methods that are able to stabilize the data flow at a target rate. The experimental results from remote visualization of large-scale scientific datasets justify the correctness of our theoretical analysis and illustrate the superior performances of the proposed method.