ADVISE, Agricultural Developmental Visualisation Interactive Software Environment

The quantum increase in computing power provided by contemporary parallel architectures offers the opportunity to confront problems of ever increasing complexity and size. With these developments new problems arise in techniques for the manipulation, transmission and display of large data sets as they occur for example in environmental modelling. The hardware and software of modern graphical display devices has the potential to enable large data sets to be presented in compact and informative configurations. The problem addressed here is to how to match these resources in an optimal way. The analysis of environmental models, for instance, is significantly aided by visualisation, however when large data structures need to be analysed the static nature of the data causes large communication overheads. Similarly if a dynamic approach is taken, while CPU power and large memory capacity may be available, communication between the computing resource and the display device can impair the development and analysis of the model. Treated as a single integrated unit such a system is likely to lead to unwieldy code which is difficult to maintain and refine. We present here a package, ADVISE, which acts as a communication interface between the client, typically a graphics device, and the server, a computing resource such as a vector supercomputer, a parallel computer or some network of machines. The approach taken is that the information system comprises three component parts, those of client, server and interface. The interface is an object of sufficient sophistication to permit the use and development of each of the client and server modules separately. Further, multiple distinct jobs may be run simultaneously for multiple clients.
SAM Research Report, 1994-03