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Abstract

We present Glimmer, a new multilevel visualization algorithm for multidimensional scaling designed to exploit modern graphics processing unit (GPU) hard-ware. We also present GPU-SF, a parallel, force-based subsystem used by Glimmer. Glimmer organizes input into a hierarchy of levels and recursively applies GPU-SF to combine and refine the levels. The multilevel nature of the algorithm helps avoid local minima while the GPU parallelism improves speed of computation. We propose a robust termination condition for GPU-SF based on a filtered approximation of the normalized stress function. We demonstrate the benefits of Glimmer in terms of speed, normalized stress, and visual quality against several previous algorithms for a range of synthetic and real benchmark datasets. We show that the performance of Glimmer on GPUs is substantially faster than a CPU implementation of the same algorithm. We also propose a novel texture paging strategy called distance paging for working with precomputed distance matrices too large to fit in texture memory.