Many of the Grand Challenge projects involve interdisciplinary collaborations, and the visualization environment must be able to handle simultaneously the preferred data structures for each discipline. Highly interactive response. The size of the datasets from these applications can exceed a terabyte, making it impossible to render all the data into any single image. Consequently, researchers often wish to explore their datasets interactively, with only a fraction of the data displayed at any single instant. This drives a need to get as much data onto the display as possible in each image, and hence very high resolution display is essential.
Complex computations require a highly interactive response.
In addition, the researcher needs an effective means of navigating through his dataset, keeping at all times a sense of where he is with respect to the whole. Virtual reality systems offer one means of creating a natural sense of this navigation through the data. There are tradeoffs in these approaches involving resolution and display speed, as well as other factors, and research in this area is needed. Any such approach, however, has a fundamental need for very rapid image rendering and display under interactive user control, and with a special emphasis on very large datasets. Massive data storage, retrieval, and management in a heterogeneous networking environment.