bwVisu - a scalable service for remote visualization and interactive applications

When large quantities of scientific data is created (for example, from simulations), it is often necessary to employ hardware for further processing that is just as powerful as e.g. the HPC cluster that created the data in the first place. Transferring the data to a local workstation for visualization and analysis is typically not only time-consuming because of the data transfer itself, but the workstation may be ill-equipped to handle the workload. For such scenarios, remote solutions are needed, that employ powerful hardware and bring the applications to the data - and not vice versa.

The bwVisu project provides such a remote service for scientists from Baden-Württemberg as well as the corresponding software stack to deploy such a service on-premise. In bwVisu, the user can log in to an intuitive web frontend which manages interactive jobs running on an HPC cluster. Once a job has been started, the user can connect to it such that the application appears in a browser window with full 3D hardware acceleration provided by the cluster. The only requirement on the client side is that the browser must support HTML5.