VisIVO Workflow-Oriented Science Gateway for Astrophysical Visualization

Nowadays visualization-based knowledge discovery can play an important role in astrophysics. Collaborative visualization can enable multiple users to share visualization experiences, e.g. by interacting simultaneously with astrophysical datasets giving feedback on what other participants are doing/seeing. Further, workflow-driven applications allow reproduction of specific visualization results, a challenging task as selecting suitable visualization parameters may not be a straightforward process. This paper presents VisIVO Science Gateway, a web-based workflow-enabled framework integrating large-scale, multidimensional datasets and applications for visualization and data filtering on Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). Advanced users are able to create, change, invoke, and monitor workflows while standard users are provided with easy-to-use customised web interfaces hiding all technical aspects of the visualization algorithms and DCI configurations.