Abstract
This paper describes an extension for GRASS GIS that enables users to perform geographic visualization tasks on tiled high-resolution displays powered by the clusters of commodity personal computers. Parallel visualization systems are becoming more common in scientific computing due to the decreasing hardware costs and availability of the open source software to support such architecture. High-resolution displays allow scientists to visualize very large datasets with minimal loss of details. Such systems have a big promise especially in the field of geographic information systems because users can naturally combine several geographic scales on a single display.
The paper discusses architecture, implementation and operation of pd-GRASS - a GRASS GIS extension for high-performance parallel visualization on tiled displays. pd-GRASS is specifically well suited for the very large geographic datasets such as LIDAR data or high-resolution nation-wide geographic databases. The paper also briefly touches on computational efficiency, performance and potential applications for such systems.
