A Responsive Architecture for Thinwire Visualization
Kenneth Beenand, Chee Keng Yap · 2007
We describe a multi-threaded client-server architecture for thinwire visualization of large datasets. A thinwire refers to a network connection in which the bandwidth is not only small but also volatile. In contrast to traditional approaches used in walkthroughs and geographic visualization, we do not design with the goal of maintaining a given frame rate—a paradigm that is difficult to maintain in a thinwire environment. Instead we focus on responsiveness, and use some properties of human conversation to suggest system behaviors that maximize perceived responsiveness. The system extensively uses concurrency, along with sophisticated data structures for task reordering and cancellation, to bring about these behaviors. We verify the correctness of our cache management protocols; correctness is non-trivial because of the task reordering and cancellation. We have implemented these techniques in a webbased interactive visualizer for a geographic description of the entire continental United States, down to street level.