Hillview: Distributed Data Visualization

Summary

Hillview is a simple cloud-based spreadsheet program for browsing large data collections. The data manipulated is read-only. Users can sort, find, filter, transform, query, zoom-in/out, and chart data. Operations are performed using direct manipulation in the GUI. Hillview is designed to work on very large data sets (billions of rows). Hillview can import data from a variety of sources: CSV files, ORC files, Parquet files, databases, parallel databases; new connectors can be added with relatively little effort. Hillview takes advantage of all the cores of the worker machines for fast visualizations.

Hillview is a distributed system, composed of two pieces:

A distributed set of one or many workers, which should be installed close to the data (e.g., on the machines that host the data).
A front-end service that runs a web server and aggregates data from all workers.

The source code of Hillview is available as an open-source project with an Apache-2 license from Hillview's github repository. For any questions, feature requests or bug reports please file an issue on github.

Requirements

Java 8 on all machines involved.
Python 2 or 3 for the installation scripts in deploying on a cluster or set of machines.
Windows subsystem for Linux if using Windows.
A modern web browser.

Instructions

Hillview is designed to be deployed as a set of service workers on a set of machines hosting data, and a front-end web server. (The webserver can run on one of the worker machines. The smallest legal cluster consists of exactly one machine hosting a worker and the web server.)

Instructions for installation on a cluster

Please read the requirements.
Install Java 8 on all cluster machines where the service will run.
The Hillview service runs with the permissions of a local user.
Enable password-less ssh access to all machines for the user account used by Hillview.
Download and extract the zip archive.
The next commands assume a bash shell. On Windows start bash from a command prompt. (You should have installed WSL as part of the requirements.)
```
cd bin
```
Edit the Hillview configuration file
```
config.json
```
This file describes the machines where Hillview will be installed. The comments in the file should serve as a guide.
Run the deployment script to install Hillview on the cluster machines.
```
./deploy.py config.json
```
To start the services run
```
./start.py config.json
```
To use Hillview open a web browser and connect to the webserver you have configured, using port 8080.
Try loading the Hillview logs: Load/Hillview logs.
When loading data remember that the data itself in general must be on the worker machines.
To stop the services run
```
./stop.py config.json
```

There are additional simplified instructions for running Hillview on a single machine (MacOS, Windows or Linux) here.

The user manual is online.

Contributors

Lalith Suresh

Mihai Budiu

VMware Research

Parikshit Gopalan

Udi Wieder

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