High-dimensional scientific data exploration via cinema

Abstract

Large-scale scientific simulations and experiments generate enormous volumes of data. Data analytics may become a bottleneck to scientific discovery without scalable tools for interactive exploration. Cinema was developed as a way to overcome hurdles by providing an exploratory, image database approach for analyzing large scientific data sets. In the following, we present several new methods for Cinema: 1) a structured data model that lends itself to querying and database support, 2) support for arbitrary data products beyond images, and 3) parameter exploration through high-dimensional visualization. These changes enrich the types of exporatory visualizations and discoveries that are naturally supported by Cinema-style analyses, further enabling data-driven science.