ABSTRACT
VAPOR is an open source visual data analysis package developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with support from the National Science Foundation. VAPOR provides a highly interactive, platform independent, desktop exploration environment, capable of handling some of the largest numerical simulation outputs, yet requiring only commodity computing resources. The cornerstone of VAPOR’s large data handling capability is a wavelet-based progressive access data model that enables the user to tradeoff I/O, memory, and computing resource requirements for data fidelity. This chapter provides an overview of VAPOR, placing an emphasis on the VAPOR strategy for handling large data. To illustrate the effectiveness of this technique, the chapter concludes with a brief case study of two data sets: one from Magneto-Hydrodynamics, and another from numerical weather prediction.
