Interactive Visualization of 3D Terrain Data Stored in the Cloud

Abstract

This paper explores recent trends in field of big data visualization based on cloud computing via the use of virtual machine hosted servers. Specifically, the visualization of terrain data acquired from several major open data sets using a graphics library for browser based rendering will be explored. It will be shown that three dimensional terrain information may be viewed and interacted with by many remote clients within a browser when using modern graphics libraries, and a collection of Amazon EC-2 machines for fetching and decoding of the terrain data. Data pre-fetching and a parallel implementation of each server further improves performance. Results from this study are expected to enable and expedite existing and future research in the terrain data visualization field.