# Animating Petascale Time-varying Data on Commodity Hardware with LLM-assisted Scripting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [NL4DV: A Toolkit for Generating Analytic Specifications for Data Visualization from Natural Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10723/) (2020)
- [ChartGPT: Leveraging LLMs to Generate Charts from Abstract Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01920/) (2023)
- [Chat2VIS: Generating Data Visualisations via Natural Language using ChatGPT, Codex and GPT-3 Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02094/) (2023)
- [AVA: Towards Autonomous Visualization Agents through Visual Perception-Driven Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04494/) (2023)
- [NLI4VolVis: Natural Language Interaction for Volume Visualization via LLM Multi-Agents and Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12621/) (2025)
- [Chain of Logic: Rule-Based Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10400/) (2024)
- [Visualization Literacy of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10996/) (2024)
- [PhenoFlow: A Human-LLM Driven Visual Analytics System for Exploring Large and Complex Stroke Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16329/) (2024)
- [Web-based Visualization and Analytics of Petascale data: Equity as a Tide that Lifts All Boats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11831/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Multi-Agent Discovery and Resource-Aware Autonomous Exploration of Scientific Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22045/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientists face significant visualization challenges as time-varying datasets grow in speed and volume, often requiring specialized infrastructure and expertise to handle massive datasets. Petascale climate models generated in NASA laboratories require a dedicated group of graphics and media experts and access to high-performance computing resources. Scientists may need to share scientific results with the community iteratively and quickly. However, the time-consuming trial-and-error process incurs significant data transfer overhead and far exceeds the time and resources allocated for typical post-analysis visualization tasks, disrupting the production workflow. Our paper introduces a user-friendly framework for creating 3D animations of petascale, time-varying data on a commodity workstation. Our contributions: (i) Generalized Animation Descriptor (GAD) with a keyframe-based adaptable abstraction for animation, (ii) efficient data access from cloud-hosted repositories to reduce data management overhead, (iii) tailored rendering system, and (iv) an LLM-assisted conversational interface as a scripting module to allow domain scientists with no visualization expertise to create animations of their region of interest. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with two case studies: first, by generating animations in which sampling criteria are specified based on prior knowledge, and second, by generating AI-assisted animations in which sampling parameters are derived from natural-language user prompts. In all cases, we use large-scale NASA climate-oceanographic datasets that exceed 1PB in size yet achieve a fast turnaround time of 1 minute to 2 hours. Users can generate a rough draft of the animation within minutes, then seamlessly incorporate as much high-resolution data as needed for the final version.