Distributed Visualization Using VTK in Grid Environments

In this paper we focus on distributed visualization using the visualization toolkit (VTK) in grid environments. We propose a distributed architecture, based on data parallelism, that allows the distribution of visualization tasks over a grid environment. We decided for globus toolkit as a middleware to provide access and location transparencies. We also add facilities for dynamic allocation of resources by using a Java framework. The focused visualization technique is Laplacian smoothing which is provided by a specific filter of the VTK library. We emphasize the obtained speedup in the experiments and discuss the implementation of pipeline parallelism as well as the generalization of our architecture for other VTK applications.