Using network of workstations to support a Web-based visualization service

Nowadays, huge amount of data can be retrieved thanks to the World Wide Web, raising to the need for new services for online data exploration and analysis. In the other hand, scientific visualization offers varying techniques to represent any kind of data visually, taking advantage of the natural skills of the human brain to analyze complex phenomena through visual representations. These techniques are computationally high demanding and can not be handled by a single machine. A Web-based visualization service would rapidly overload the machine and slow down the Web service dramatically. This paper describes visc-Web, a distributed visualization architecture, which allows us to use a pool of workstations connected through Internet as a computational resource for a Web-based visualization service. This general architecture could be used to support any kind of Web-based computation service.