VegaFusion: Automatic Server-Side Scaling for Interactive Vega Visualizations

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Nicolas Kruchten, Jon Mease, Dominik Moritz

 View presentation:2022-10-19T19:09:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2022-10-19T19:09:00Z

Exemplar figure, described by caption below — A generic Vega specification is automatically partitioned by the VegaFusion Planner into a runtime specification for the VegaFusion Middleware (describing operations on large datasets) and a client specification for Vega (describing the visualization of the output of these operations as well as client-side interactions). The Middleware dynamically responds to interaction signals from Vega by querying an out-of-browser, natively-compiled VegaFusion Runtime instance and relaying the results back to Vega.

Prerecorded Talk

The live footage of the talk, including the Q&A, can be viewed on the session page, Visualization Systems and Graph Visualization.

Keywords

Human-centered computing—Visualization—Visualization systems and tools—Visualization toolkits; Human-centered computing—Visualization—Visualization application domains—Information visualization;

Abstract

The Vega grammar has been broadly adopted by a growing ecosystem of browser-based visualization tools. However, the reference Vega renderer does not scale well to large datasets (e.g., millions of rows or hundreds of megabytes) because it requires the entire dataset to be loaded into browser memory. We introduce VegaFusion, which brings automatic server-side scaling to the Vega ecosystem. VegaFusion accepts generic Vega specifications and partitions the required computation between the client and an out-of-browser, natively-compiled server-side process. Large datasets can be processed server-side to avoid loading them into the browser and to take advantage of multi-threading, more powerful server hardware and caching. We demonstrate how VegaFusion can be integrated into the existing Vega ecosystem, and show that VegaFusion greatly outperforms the reference implementation. We demonstrate these benefits with VegaFusion running on the same machine as the client as well as on a remote machine.