Practical resource management for grid-based visual exploration

Computational grids are enabling collaboration between scientists and organizations to generate and archive extremely large datasets across shared, distributed resources. There is a need to visually explore such data throughout the life-cycle of projects. Practical exploration of large datasets requires visualization tools that can function in the same grid environment in which the data is created and stored. Resource management interfaces are an important structural component of grid computing environments because they enable uniform access to the wide variety of resources necessary for scientific work. We describe a new advance-reservation system for graphics resources; and an application of existing grid technology to create general-purpose active storage systems. We report our experience with prototype infrastructure and application components, involving experiments coupling end-to-end resources for interactive visual exploration of large data in representative distributed environments.