Scalable, Robust Visualization of Large Trees

The TreeJuxtaposer system [MGT*03] allowed visual comparison of large trees with guaranteed visibility of land- marks and Focus+Context navigation. While that system allowed exploration and comparison of larger datasets than previous work, it was limited to a single tree of 775,000 nodes by a large memory footprint. In this paper, we describe the theoretical limitations to TreeJuxtaposer�s architecture that severely restrict its scalability. We pro- vide two scalable, robust solutions to these limitations: TJC and TJC-Q. TJC is a system that supports browsing trees up to 15 million nodes by exploiting leading-edge graphics hardware while TJC-Q allows browsing trees up to 5 million nodes on commodity platforms. Both of these systems use a fast new algorithm for drawing and culling and benefit from a complete redesign of all data structures for more efficient memory usage and reduced preprocessing time.

Beerman, Dale, Tamara Munzner, and Grigori Humphreys. "Scalable, Robust Visualization of Large Trees." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (2004).