Visualization of molecular structures using state-of-the-art techniques in WebGL
Finian Mwalongo, Michael Krone, Grzegorz Karol Karch, Michael Becher, Guido Reina, Thomas Ertl · 2014
The potential of web browsers as a platform for remote visualization has long been recognized. One of the motivations behind remote visualization has mainly been large data that cannot be easily transferred to the client. Further impeding factors for local visualization at the client side included lack of compute power or capabilities as well as lack of native support for hardware-accelerated APIs in the browser. However, moving the visualization to a remote site is challenging because of high latency and low available bandwidth affecting interactivity and visual quality. Although bandwidth is continuously improving, latency remains an issue. To obtain optimal interactivity, the rendering needs to be performed on the client machine. With the introduction of WebGL, it is now possible to exploit the power of the GPU inside the browser without third-party additions. We present a GPU-based ray-casting technique for the visualization of molecular structures that adheres to the restrictions of WebGL. We describe implementation details with respect to these restrictions and present the results and performance. Biomolecules with tens of thousands of atoms can be rendered at interactive rates. This shows the potential of establishing the web as an attractive platform for interactive visualization using GPU-accelerated algorithms.