Abstract
Although applications of functional programming are diverse, most examples deal with modest amounts of data – no more than a few megabytes. This paper describes how Haskell has been used to address a challenging astrophysics visualization problem, where the complete uncompressed dataset is nearly a terabyte. Our solution makes extensive use of three novel domain-specific languages: to specify data resources, to abstract over rendering operations, and most significantly, to design the desired visualization. The result is a powerful framework for time-varying multi-field visualization. This approach represents a significant departure from standard practices in the visualization field, and has application well beyond the original problem. That our solution consists of less than 4.5K lines of code is itself a notable result. This paper motivates and describes the overall architecture of our solution, and technical features of the DSLs that are used in place of the traditional visualization pipeline.
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Duke, D.J., Borgo, R., Wallace, M., Runciman, C. (2008). Huge Data But Small Programs: Visualization Design via Multiple Embedded DSLs. In: Gill, A., Swift, T. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5418. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92995-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92995-6_3
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