Web-based Visualization and Analytics of Petascale data: Equity as a Tide that Lifts All Boats

TL;DR

This paper introduces a browser-based system for managing, visualizing, and analyzing petascale climate data, making large-scale scientific datasets accessible and interactive for diverse users, including students from minority-serving institutions.

Contribution

It presents a novel data fabric abstraction and optimized streaming techniques enabling interactive analysis of petascale data on various devices, promoting equitable access to scientific information.

Findings

Effective visualization of petascale climate data in browsers

Enhanced network efficiency through progressive compression

Successful deployment in educational settings at minority-serving institutions

Abstract

Scientists generate petabytes of data daily to help uncover environmental trends or behaviors that are hard to predict. For example, understanding climate simulations based on the long-term average of temperature, precipitation, and other environmental variables is essential to predicting and establishing root causes of future undesirable scenarios and assessing possible mitigation strategies. While supercomputer centers provide a powerful infrastructure for generating petabytes of simulation output, accessing and analyzing these datasets interactively remains challenging on multiple fronts. This paper presents an approach to managing, visualizing, and analyzing petabytes of data within a browser on equipment ranging from the top NASA supercomputer to commodity hardware like a laptop. Our novel data fabric abstraction layer allows user-friendly querying of scientific information while hiding the complexities of dealing with file systems or cloud services. We also optimize network utilization while streaming from petascale repositories through state-of-the-art progressive compression algorithms. Based on this abstraction, we provide customizable dashboards that can be accessed from any device with any internet connection, enabling interactive visual analysis of vast amounts of data to a wide range of users - from top scientists with access to leadership-class computing environments to undergraduate students of disadvantaged backgrounds from minority-serving institutions. We focus on NASA's use of petascale climate datasets as an example of particular societal impact and, therefore, a case where achieving equity in science participation is critical. We further validate our approach by deploying the dashboards and simplified training materials in the classroom at a minority-serving institution.