  Hillview is a distributed spreadsheet for browsing very large datasets that
cannot be handled by a single machine. As a spreadsheet, Hillview provides a
high degree of interactivity that permits data analysts to explore information
quickly along many dimensions while switching visualizations on a whim. To
provide the required responsiveness, Hillview introduces visualization
sketches, or vizketches, as a simple idea to produce compact data
visualizations. Vizketches combine algorithmic techniques for data
summarization with computer graphics principles for efficient rendering. While
simple, vizketches are effective at scaling the spreadsheet by parallelizing
computation, reducing communication, providing progressive visualizations, and
offering precise accuracy guarantees. Using Hillview running on eight servers,
we can navigate and visualize datasets of tens of billions of rows and
trillions of cells, much beyond the published capabilities of competing
systems.
