Book excerpt: Visualization and analysis tools, techniques, and algorithms have undergone a rapid evolution in recent decades to accommodate explosive growth in data size and complexity and to exploit emerging multi- and many-core computational platforms. High Performance Visualization: Enabling Extreme-Scale Scientific Insight focuses on the subset of scientific visualization concerned with algorithm design, implementation, and optimization for use on today’s largest computational platforms. The book collects some of the most seminal work in the field, including algorithms and implementations running at the highest levels of concurrency and used by scientific researchers worldwide. After introducing the fundamental concepts of parallel visualization, the book explores approaches to accelerate visualization and analysis operations on high performance computing platforms. Looking to the future and anticipating changes to computational platforms in the transition from the petascale to exascale regime, it presents the main research challenges and describes several contemporary, high performance visualization implementations. Reflecting major concepts in high performance visualization, this book unifies a large and diverse body of computer science research, development, and practical applications. It describes the state of the art at the intersection of scientific visualization, large data, and high performance computing trends, giving readers the foundation to apply the concepts and carry out future research in this area.