The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has unveiled what is says is the highest resolution display system for scientific visualization in the world at the University of California, San Diego. The system targets to the need for scientists to explore vast amounts of data visually and collaboratively in ultra-high resolution environments.
Developed on a multi-tile paradigm, the Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space (HIPerSpace) features nearly 287 million pixels of screen resolution. The system uses 70 Dell 30-in. displays arranged in 14 columns of five displays. Each of these “tiles” has a resolution of 2560 by 1600 pixels, creating a visible resolution of 35,840 by 8000 pixels on a wall 31.8 ft. by 7.5 ft. The wall is powered by 18 Dell XPS 710/720 computers with Intel quad-core 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.
The new HIPerSpace wall is a 30% expansion of the first HIPerSpace wall at UC San Diego, built in 2006. That system was moved to a larger location in Atkinson Hall, the Calit2 building at the university, where it was expanded by 66 million pixels to take advantage of the new space. The system was used officially for the first time on June 16 to demonstrate applications for a delegation from the National Geographic Society.
“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 half-way 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.”
California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology
www.calit2.net