Supporting a visualization application on a self-adapting grid middleware

This paper describes how we have used a self-adapting middleware to implement a distributed and adaptive volume rendering application. The middleware we have used is GATES (grid-based adaptive execution on streams), which allows processing of streaming data in a distributed environment. A challenge in supporting such an application on streaming data is to balance the visualization quality and the speed of processing, which can be automatically done by the GATES middleware. We describe how we divide the application into a number of processing stages, and what adaptation parameters we use. Our experimental studies have focused on evaluating the self-adaptation enabled by the middleware, and measuring the overhead associated with the use of middleware.