An architecture for a scientific visualization system

This paper describes the architecture of Data Explorer, a scientific visualization system. Data Explorer supports visualization of a wide variety of data by means of a flexible set of visualization modules. This paper discusses five elements of the system architecture: 1) A single powerful data model common to all modules that allows a wide range of data types to be imported and passed between modules. 2) Integral support for parallelism, affecting the data model and the execution model. 3) A powerful set of visualization modules that are highly interoperable, due in part to the common data model, and exemplified by the renderer. 4) An execution model designed to facilitate parallelization of modules and incorporating optimizations such as caching. 5) A two-process clientserver system structure consisting of a user interface that communicates with an executive via a dataflow language.