No matter how users conduct science, a crucial aspect of scientific discovery is the process of understanding the information contained in the data. Analysis, visualization, and data exploration are key components in this process. The goal of the TeraGrid Visualization (TGviz) effort is to combine existing resources and current technology (including commodity clusters and commodity graphics, terascale visualization clusters, Grid technology, and efforts, expertise, and tools from each of the TeraGrid partner sites) to enable new and novel ways of visually interacting with and gaining insight into science through the analysis of simulations and data. This is done through the production of visualization services for users, and providing tools and libraries for researchers in visualization and graphics. TeraGrid also deploys visualization resources for batch, interactive, and collaborative visualization.

Testbed services will support current and prototype TeraGrid software stacks for production analysis, will enable active testing of new software components, and will foster long-term development for TeraGrid user projects before wide-scale deployment.

These testbed services will benefit the entire TeraGrid community. Users will be able to access TeraGrid-aware visualization applications in a way that appears to be a desktop visualization solution but in reality makes use of the rich TGviz resources. Needed infrastructure will be provided for developers of specific visualization tools or parallel graphics. Over time this infrastructure will include access to low-level services that can be combined for custom applications.

The TGviz effort emphasizes three principal areas:

1. Investigation of challenges to running a large-scale visualization Grid facility;
2. Development of methods to effectively enable the remote interaction of users with sophisticated visualization systems, and the subsequent delivery of results to users from those systems; and
3. Improvement of the data analysis capabilities of the TeraGrid community through the availability of visualization services.