An architecture for a scientific visualization system

The architecture of the Data Explorer, a scientific visualization system, is described. Data Explorer supports the visualization of a wide variety of data by means of a flexible set of visualization modules. A single powerful data model common to all modules allows a wide range of data types to be imported and passed between modules. There is integral support for parallelism, affecting the data model and the execution model. The visualization modules are highly interoperable, due in part to the common data model, and exemplified by the renderer. An execution model facilitates parallelization of modules and incorporates optimizations such as caching. The two-process client-server system structure consists of a user interface that communicates with an executive via a dataflow language