Chunking up visualization

Image via WikipediaTechnology Review has an article about visualization software specifically designed for big data. In recent years we have seen trends towards algorithms and methods designed towards dealing with large amounts of data using commodity hardware. We’ve already seen the Map-Reduce algorithm being applied to any number of data driven problems, including the analysis of large molecular dynamics trajectories.

The software described in Technology Review, likely best described in Attila Gyulassy‘s PhD Thesis, takes the common approach of breaking down a problem in smaller chunks, easier said than done when dealing with visualization. Now, I am not exactly a visualization guru, so how good this work is in practice I cannot say. But it is part of a trend that I really like, a trend towards new methods that take advantage of modern commodity infrastructure and computing paradigms to solve real problems, and hopefully in ways that make them easy to program and easy to use.

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