Spatial prefetching for out-of-core visualization of multidimensional data

In this paper we propose a technique called storage-aware spatial prefetching that can provide significant performance improvements for out-of-core visualization. This approach is motivated by file chunking in which a multidimensional data file is reorganized into multidimensional sub-blocks that are stored linearly in the file. This increases the likelihood that data close in the n-dimensional volume represented by the file will be closer together in the physical file. Chunking has been demonstrated to improve the typical access to such data, but it requires a complete re-organization of the file and sometimes efficient access is only achieved if multiple different chunking organizations are maintained simultaneously. Our approach can be thought of as on-the-fly chunking, but it does not require physical re-organization of the data or multiple copies with different formats. We also describe an implementation of our technique and provide some performance results that are very promising.