Figure 5

Comparison of image rendering times for different datasets and zoom levels. Complexity of the visual representation has a large effect on rendering time, as does the number of features visible in the viewing area. Whiskers indicate the range of rendering times, while boxes show the middle two quartiles. Rendering is usually under one second even for very complex renderings on workstation class hardware and slower but still acceptable on a low-end machine. Slower rendering times are associated with cache misses. The B. anthracis dataset (43 million features total, shown in figure 1) is the fastest to render, benefiting from the scaling renderer that adapts to zoom level. The H. salinarum dataset (7.25 million features total, shown in panel 1 of figure 4) is of moderate complexity with 30 total tracks. Shown are rendering times for a zoomed in view with 20 thousand features visible and a zoomed out view with 200 thousand features visible. The S. solfataricus dataset, (27 million features total, shown in panel 2 of figure 4) with 39 tracks including heatmaps shows slowest rendering times. We show rendering times for 10 thousand and 20 thousand features. While more zoomed out views of datasets with heatmaps render slowly, the program remains responsive at all times.