VisIVO: A Tool for the Virtual Observatory and Grid Environment (original) (raw)

VisIVO–Integrated Tools and Services for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2010

VisIVO is an integrated suite of tools and services specifically designed for the Virtual Observatory. This suite constitutes a software framework for effective visual discovery in currently available (and next-generation) very large-scale astrophysical datasets. VisIVO consists of VisiVO Desktop -a stand alone application for interactive visualization on standard PCs, VisIVO Server -a grid-enabled platform for high performance visualization and VisIVO Web -a custom designed web portal supporting services based on the VisIVO Server functionality. The main characteristic of VisIVO is support for high-performance, multidimensional visualization of very large-scale astrophysical datasets. Users can obtain meaningful visualizations rapidly while preserving full and intuitive control of the relevant visualization parameters. This paper focuses on newly developed integrated tools in VisIVO Server allowing intuitive visual discovery with 3D views being created from data tables. VisIVO Server can be installed easily on any web server with a database repository. We discuss briefly aspects of our implementation of VisiVO Server on a computational grid and also outline the functionality of the services offered by VisIVO Web. Finally we conclude with a summary of our work and pointers to future developments.

An Archive and Tools for Cosmological Simulations inside the Virtual Observatory

2008

The Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory (ITVO) is a test-bed project for the inclusion of theoretical data and related tools inside the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA, Hanisch & Quinn, 2003). We started cooperating with the IVOA community to develop standards and tools applicable to the theoretical data obtained from cosmological simulations. The database structure has been created with the main

Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis of Complex Astrophysical Data

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2007

In this paper we show how advanced visualization tools can help the researcher in investigating and extracting information from data. The focus is on VisIVO, a novel open source graphics application, which blends high performance multidimensional visualization techniques and up-to-date technologies to cooperate with other applications and to access remote, distributed data archives. VisIVO supports the standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance in order to make it interoperable with VO data repositories. The paper describes the basic technical details and features of the software and it dedicates a large section to show how VisIVO can be used in several scientific cases.

Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop

2009

) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.

Astrophysical Data Analysis and Visualization Toolkit

F. Murtagh, G. Longo, J.-L. …

AstroMD is a visualization software offering several capabilities specifically oriented to the cosmological analysis of three-dimensional structures. It was developed within the framework of the Cosmo.Lab project, financially supported by the European Community, which ...

Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory (ITVO): cosmological simulations in the VO frame

2009

Cosmological simulations' output can be stored in an archive and ingested into a database. Then can be connected to a web interface to allow the end user to explore it. This matches the VO idea of handling the data directly on the server side leaving the user only with the results of the query, or other end products, on his own machine. Besides data searching data centers are then requested to provide services to let the user preview and analyze data and metadata (both generated on-the-fly or pre-computed) with computing performed on the server side and letting only the results to be visualized on the user desktop (or sent to him). Here we present the IA2-ITVO (Italian Center for Astronomical Archives - Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory) archive web interface mainly focusing on the 'Level 2' post-processing capabilities of the portal and its connection with other VO tools.

A Multi Dimensional Visualization and Analysis Toolkit for Astrophysics

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

The AstroMD toolkit is a visualization and analysis software, specifically oriented to astrophysical data representation. It is included in the project Cosmo.Lab, financed by the European Community, which involves several European astrophysical institutions and CINECA. This tool gives a 3D graphic representation of the data exploiting all the available information and making use of the immersive visualization techniques. AstroMD uses the most advanced visualization technology, based on virtual reality, in order to build a leading edge instrument both for scientific research and for cultural dissemination and education. It is developed using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) by Kitware (http://www.kitware.com), a freely available visualization library portable on several platforms. AstroMD is an open source completely free code which is freely available (http://cosmolab.cineca.it).

Science with VO tools: the AstroGrid VO Desktop

Multi Wavelength Astronomy and Virtual Observatory, 2009

We introduce a general range of science drivers for using the Virtual Observatory (VO) and identify some common aspects to these as well as the advantages of VO data access. We then illustrate the use of existing VO tools to tackle multi wavelength science problems. We demonstrate the ease of multi mission data access using the VOExplorer resource browser, as provided by Astro-Grid (http://www.astrogrid.org) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.

VisIVOWeb: A WWW Environment for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2011

This paper presents a newly developed WWW environment called VisIVOWeb aiming at providing the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for large-scale datasets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can handle effectively modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our software is open-source based on established visualization toolkits and offers high quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed together with the supported visualization interfaces and movie making functionality. We introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized web portals for visual discovery and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a discussion on future developments.