tag: gpu

A compiler infrastructure for data visualization

2015-07-24

There are many data visualization tools out there. Yet, I believe we're still lacking a robust, scalable, and cross-platform visualization toolkit that can handle today's massive datasets.

Most existing tools target simple plots with a few hundreds or thousands of points: bar plots, scatter plots, histograms and the like. Typically, these figures represent aggregated statistical quantities. Maps are also particularly popular, and there are now really great open source tools.

Perhaps contrary to a common belief, this is not the end of the story. There are much more complex visualization needs in academia and industry, and I've always been unsatisfied by the tools at our disposal.

Big Data visualization with WebGL, part 2: VisPy

2014-12-11

In this post series, I'm describing the big data visualization platform I'm currently developing with WebGL. I'll detail in this second post the VisPy library which is the basis of the project.

Big Data visualization with WebGL, part 1: Overview

2014-10-15

In this post series, I'll talk about the big data visualization platform I'm currently developing with WebGL. I'll give in this first post the main motivations for this project. The next posts will contain the technical details.

Hardware-accelerated interactive data visualization in Python

2013-04-04

There have been several interesting discussions recently about the future of visualization in Python. Jake Vanderplas wrote a detailled post about the current state-of-the-art of visualization software in Python. Michael Droettboom, one of the Matplotlib's core developers, consequently wrote about the future challenges Matplotlib will need to tackle. Matplotlib has been designed more than ten years ago, and now needs to embrace modern trends including web frontends, high-level R-style plotting interfaces, hardware-accelerated visualization, etc.

The Power of Shaders in Real-Time Graphics Programming

2012-11-05

I've been programming in OpenGL for a few months. Like a lot of programmers, I learnt the language by myself, thanks to various tutorials, books or e-books on the subject. One couldn't say there's a lack of resources on this 20-years old language since it's so widely used throughout the world. Yet, I was surprised to discover a few weeks ago that the vast majority of what I learnt has been obsolete for almost a decade. The reason is that too many textbooks and tutorials on the Internet about OpenGL refer to a deprecated way of programming and which relates to the fixed-function pipeline. The modern way of programming in OpenGL is to use the programmable pipeline through shaders. The free e-book by Jason McKesson is a very good resource for learning modern OpenGL programming using the programmable pipeline.