Accelerated distributed visualisation in the Theoretical Astrophysical Observatory (TAO)

The Theoretical Astrophysical Observatory (TAO) is a virtual laboratory that provides pipelines to build mock observations of galaxy survey data and other derived data products based on different cosmological dark matter simulations and semianalytic galaxy formation models. We present recent work towards web-based interactive visual exploration of large datasets in TAO, using the high performance volume rendering technique Splotch - a ray-casting approach for visualising complex and multivariate large-scale point clouds. We outline how Splotch was adapted to accommodate specific TAO requirements and discuss work to expose functionalities through a web interface giving non technical TAO users the possibility to deploy Splotch in an HPC environment for easy access to state-of-the-art simulated data for a wide user base of astronomers.