Enabling Fast, Effective Visualization of Voluminous Gridded Spatial Datasets

Abstract

Gridded spatial datasets arise naturally in environmental, climatic, meteorological, and ecological settings. Each grid point encapsulates a vector of variables representing different measures of interest. Gridded datasets tend to be voluminous since they encapsulate observations for long timescales. Visualizing such datasets poses significant challenges stemming from the need to preserve interactivity, manage I/O overheads, and cope with data volumes. Here we present our methodology to significantly alleviate I/O requirements by leveraging deep neural network-based models and a distributed, in-memory cache to facilitate interactive visualizations. Our benchmarks demonstrate that deploying our lightweight models coupled with back-end caching and prefetching schemes can reduce the client's query response time by 92.3% while maintaining a high perceptual quality with a PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) of 38.7 dB.