The gViz Project Research Overview Background to the Project

Grid computing is extending the horizons of computational science, allowing aggregated computing resources to be harnessed in the solution of major problems.  Visualization plays a crucial role in this activity: we shall fail to gain proper benefits from Grid computing without an effective means of interpreting the results from the large applications that can now be run. 

The goal of this particular project has been to investigate the middleware required to support visualization systems in a Grid environment.  Our approach has been pragmatic: first to evolve two existing visualization systems to work in a secure distributed fashion, providing tangible benefits to the e-science community within the lifetime of the project; second, from that initial basis to seek abstractions that have greater generality and will contribute to the long-term development of visualization for e-science.  The partners in the project are the Universities of Leeds, Oxford and Oxford Brookes; CLRC; and NAG Ltd, IBM UK Ltd and Streamline Computing Ltd.  This research overview has been jointly written by the partners.