Technology Trends and Challenges for Large-Scale Scientific Visualization

Scientific visualization is a key approach to understanding the growing massive streams of data from scientific simulations and experiments. In this article, I review technology trends including the positive effects of Moore's law on science, the significant gap between processing and data storage speeds, the emergence of hardware accelerators for ray-tracing, and the availability of robust machine learning techniques. These trends represent changes to the status quo and present the scientific visualization community with a new set of challenges. A major challenge involves extending our approaches to visualize the modern scientific process, which includes scientific verification and validation. Another key challenge to the community is the growing number, size, and complexity of scientific datasets. A final challenge is to take advantage of emerging technology trends in custom hardware and machine learning to significantly improve the large-scale data visualization process.