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Graphs are most often visualized in the two dimensional Euclidean plane, but spherical space offers several advantages when visualizing graphs. First, some graphs such as skeletons of three dimensional polytopes (tetrahedron, cube, icosahedron) have spherical realizations that capture their 3D structure, which cannot be visualized as well in the Euclidean plane. Second, the sphere makes possible a natural “focus + context" visualization with more detail in the center of the view and less details away from the center. Finally, whereas layouts in the Euclidean plane implicitly define notions of “central" and “peripheral" nodes, this issue is reduced on the sphere, where the layout can be centered at any node of interest. We first consider a projection-reprojection method that relies on transformations often seen in cartography and describe the implementation of this method in the GMap visualization system. This approach allows many different types of 2D graph visualizations, such as node-link diagrams, LineSets, BubbleSets and MapSets, to be converted into spherical web browser visualizations. Next we consider an approach based on spherical multidimensional scaling, which performs graph layout directly on the sphere. This approach supports node-link diagrams and GMap-style visualizations, rendered in the web browser using WebGL.
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GraphWaGu: GPU Powered Large Scale Graph Layout Computation and Rendering for the Web.
Large scale graphs are used to encode data from a variety of application domains such as social networks, the web, biological networks, road maps, and finance. Computing enriching layouts and interactive rendering play an important role in many of these applications. However, producing an efficient and interactive visualization of large graphs remains a major challenge, particularly in the web-browser. Existing state of the art web-based visualization systems such as D3.js, Stardust, and NetV.js struggle to achieve interactive layout and visualization for large scale graphs. In this work, we leverage the latest WebGPU technology to develop GraphWaGu, the first WebGPU-based graph visualization system. WebGPU is a new graphics API that brings the full capabilities of modern GPUs to the web browser. Leveraging the computational capabilities of the GPU using this technology enables GraphWaGu to scale to larger graphs than existing technologies. GraphWaGu embodies both fast parallel rendering and layout creation using modified Frutcherman-Reingold and Barnes-Hut algorithms implemented in WebGPU compute shaders. Experimental results demonstrate that our solution achieves the best performance, scalability, and layout quality when compared to current state of the art web-based graph visualization libraries. All of our source code for the project is available at https://github.com/harp-lab/GraphWaGu.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2132013
- PAR ID:
- 10384648
- Editor(s):
- Bujack, Roxana and
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 73-83
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
