Visualizing 1 trillion data points in real-time with .NET charts

DemoA WPF project made to render 1,000,000,000,000 data points using the DigitalLineSeries.

Today, LightningChart .NET has broken a world-recorld and achieved a major milestone in performance and data rendering.

A few years ago, we breached the rendering of 1 billion data points in a chart setting LightningChart .NET with the world record. Today, LightningChart .NET can visualize 1,000 times more than before.

LightningChart .NET is now able to render 1 trillion data points in a real-time scrolling use-case.

What is LightningChart .NET?

LightningChart .NET is a data visualization component (charting library) compatible with WinForms, UWP, and WPF. LightningChart
.NET has been intensively developed to meet the highest performance requirements of demanding application developers and end-users.

Software developers and engineers working in highly demanding industries like vibration analysis, medical devices manufacturing, or trading and finance, build data-oriented applications that must process massive amounts of data in real-time without downsampling a single data point.

If you want to learn more about the technology powering LightningChart .NET visit the product page.

What is the 1 trillion data points major breakthrough about?

The new version of LightningChart .NET v.10.3 has brought in several performance improvements and new additions, including a brand-new line series named the DigitalLineSeries which displays a line alternating between two Y-values.

The novelty about the DigitalLineSeries is that it refers to a binary stepping line for visualizing digital logic states and from all the line series available in LightningChart .NET, this one consumes the least amount of memory.

Visualizing One Trillion Data Points in Real-Time

Image: Visualizing 1 trillion data points with the DigitalLineSeries in LightningChart .NET

Test specifications

These were the specification and parameters during the test:

Device Hardware & Operating System Specifications

High-end desktop PC

Windows 10

CPU

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

RAM

128 GB

GPU

Nvidia GTX 1070

Test Parameters

Digital line series count

100X axis length 10 billion data points

Data point append count / round / series:

6250*

*1 Trillion data points is breached with data lines reach the end of chart, 10 billion * 100 series = 1 Trillion data points in total

Test overview

Along with the release of LightningChart .NET v.10.3, we’ve performed rendering and performance tests where we were able to demonstrate how the new line series DigitalLineSeries can visualize 1 trillion data points (1,000,000,000,000) in a real-time scrolling use case.

During the tests, we monitored the frames-per-second (FPS) and observed a high FPS rate of around 60hz. The frames-per-second indicate the times per second that a chart or visualization is updated. The higher the FPS rate, the better but as a reference, a good FPS should be at least 40 or more.

No downsampling was used

Downsampling refers to a technique that contrasts true high-performance as it is implemented when there is a need to render million, billion or more data points.

The way how downsampling works is by processing only a limited percentage of data points, for instance, instead of processing 100% of the data points, only 1% is processed. This is a common workaround that eases the resources consumption in the device at the cost of a huge loss of information.

When visualizing 1 trillion data points, every single data point was fully included in the rendering.

LightningChart .NET becomes the first charting library capable to visualize several times more data than any other WPF data visualization solution has been able to, using 128 GB RAM.

1 Trillion data points

The next video showscases how the DigitalLineSeries renders, in a scrolling mode, 1 trillion data points using 99 different data stream channels simultaneously.

From the top left corner, you can see different presets available. In terms of the device’s resource consumption, the first preset is the most affordable as it renders 10 million data points using only 1 GB of RAM, a feasible process for even the most low-end devices.

The last available preset corresponds to rendering 1 trillion data points using 128 GB of RAM. This preset is suggested to be used in high-end devices for applications with data intensive processes.

visualizing one trillion data points and different visualization presets are available

As visible in the video, at the end of the process, it can be seen the total number of data points that were rendered: 1,109,080,000,000. Over 1 trillion data points are actually visualized.

Visualizing one trillion data points and more

Replicating the test

This test can be replicated by any user with a desktop device capable to handle the test requirements.

LightningChart .NET can be downloaded via the free trial version of 30 days.

After downloading LightningChart .NET, you’ll get access to the desktop interactive examples where you can search for the DigitalLineSeries and execute the test.

The test can be adjusted to your device’s specifications, for instance, visualizing 5 billion data points with 4 GB RAM or 40 billion with 16 GB RAM.

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