Early Prototypes of a Zoomable Run Viewer for IceCube
Day 1
I have long wanted to create a zoomable, pannable Web-based view in IceCube Live which would show everything of relevance which happened in the IceCube Neutrino Detector at a wide variety of timescales. This is something which was discussed at various times but which never managed to make it into the development schedule.
Recently, however, I discovered D3.js, which makes some crazy awesome visualizations fairly easy; so I spent yesterday creating a first version of what I wanted: a UI tool which displays IceCube runs (periods of data collection; simulated, in this case, and shown in green) at a variety of time scales.
There are many things to improve – runs that overlap two time bars don’t display correctly; zooming and panning is somewhat jagged; and, of course, there is a lot more information to add to the display. But it already shows the direction I want to go and I was pleased at what I was able to arrive at with only a day’s worth of development.
The implementation uses D3.js and jQuery (JavaScript) on the client, and Django (Python) with MySQL on the backend. Next steps are to fix display of runs that wrap from one time bar to the next, and to make the Ajax calls back to the server more efficient so that information is only fetched as needed (right now there is a lot of inefficient re-fetching of information). Then I’ll overlay more information like run numbers, graphs of data rates, and allow specific display elements to link to other pages inside of IceCube Live. Also IceCube has very high uptime so any gaps should probably be shown in red.
In the video zooming is being done with the mousewheel and panning is done by clicking and dragging.
Update - Day 2 added, below.
Prototype time-based view for IceCube Live from John Jacobsen on Vimeo.
Day 2
Though a shorter work day today, I managed make some more progress on the prototype:
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Fixed wrapping of runs from one time band to the next
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Zoom in and out more or less from whatever run is currently at the cursor (only works well when number of bands doesn’t change)
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Allow panning in Y (whole time bands) as well as X direction
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Code cleanup
The results are shown here:
Day 2 - IceCube Live time-based run view prototype from John Jacobsen on Vimeo.
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