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| New HIPerSpace display system unveiled for scientific study |
| by GV staff |
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The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has unveiled the highest-resolution display system for scientific visualization in the world at the University of California, San Diego.
Called the Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space, or HIPerSpace, the display system is an integral part of the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter infrastructure, which includes "OptIPortal" tiled display systems on and beyond the UCSD campus that are the primary end-point for scientists using the infrastructure.
The display system features nearly 287 million pixels of screen resolution and is more than 10 percent larger (in terms of pixels) than the second-largest display in the world, constructed recently at the NASA Ames Research Center. That system -- known as the Hyperwall-2 -- was developed by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames with support from Colfax International.
Amazingly it took our team less than a day to tear down the original wall, relocate and expand it, said Falko Kuester, principal investigator of the HIPerSpace system. The higher resolution display takes us more than halfway to our ultimate goal of building a half-billion-pixel tiled display system to give researchers an unprecedented ability to look broadly at large data sets while also zooming in to the tiniest details
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The system features 70 high-resolution Dell 30-inch displays, arranged in 14 columns of five displays each. Each tile has a resolution of 2,560x1,600 pixels bringing the combined, visible resolution to 35,640x8,000 pixels. The wall is powered by 18 Dell XPS 710/720 computers with Intel quad-core central processing units (CPUs) and dual nVIDIA FX5600 graphics processing units. A head node and six streaming nodes complete the hardware pool for a total of 100 processor cores and 38 GPUs.
HIPerSpace is a research testbed for visualization frameworks needed for massive resolution digital wallpaper displays of the near future that will leverage bezel-free tiles and provide uninterrupted visual content. The most notable of these frameworks is the Cross-Platform Cluster Graphics Library (CGLX), which introduces a new approach to high-performance hardware accelerated visualization on ultra-high-resolution display systems. It provides a cluster management framework, a development API as well as a selected set of cluster-ready applications. Coinciding with the launch of the expanded HIPerSpace system, Calit2 announced the official release of CGLX version 1.2.1.
MORE INFO
Dell dell.com
NVIDIA nvidia.com
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