Arbitrary Resolution Graphical Applications in SAGE
Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is a software suite to implement a clustered tiled display, a technique to harness the graphical output of multiple computers into a single coherent display. SAGE has an application programming interface (API) which can be used to modify existing applications to run on SAGE based tiled displays. However the complexity of some applications, along with requirements for interactivity, make this approach impracticable in some cases. An example of such a case is the use of web browsers in the bioinformatics field to visualise genome sequences, whose output sizes can be several time larger than a high definition desktop display. Ordinarily, the only way to navigate sequences of this size is to scroll the browser output vertically and horizontally; it is not possible to view the entire sequence at its natural resolution.
In this presentation I will describe a new technique to enable an unmodified web browser to run at an arbitrary size in a SAGE based clustered tiled display. As well as thus allowing an entire genome sequence to be viewed at its natural resolution (in this example, 5000x3551 pixels) without scrolling or resizing, user interaction with the running browser via the display is also enabled.
It will become apparent that this technique is not resticted to web browsers alone; any application which is not readily reprogrammable to incorporate the SAGE API can instead be subject to this new display technique. Furthermore, the user interaction with an application running in a SAGE display is a completely new capability. In effect, this technique allows any graphical application to be applied to a SAGE display.
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Christoph Willing's Biography |
