Comments on: Powerwall with 250,000,000 pixels [UPDATED]

By: I’ll see your 250M pixels and raise you… | insideHPC

I’ll see your 250M pixels and raise you… | insideHPC — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 04:32:46 +0000

[...] that NASA, in a fit of showboating, has built a really big power wall: 250M pixels in a gigantic tiled display that, as it turns out, they often don’t use as a [...]

By: HPCer

HPCer — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:22:58 +0000

OK, so you’re saying it’s impressive, but its full capability will rarely be used. How much taxpayer funding was that again?

By: John Leidel

John Leidel — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:56:18 +0000

Indeed, 250M dots is a bit much for one to take in. Now, I’ve actually stood in front of this thing and it quite impressive. In speaking with the NAS head of visualization, Chris Henze, I’ve learned they have quite a few proprietary apps that power this thing. Apparently, they will rarely ever run visualizations across the entire screen. Information overload. Instead, they can run any number of smaller, high resolution scenarios on subsets of the screens simultaneously.

By: John West

John West — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:12:16 +0000

Ahhhh….the $10M question. The technical argument for more pixels in general is that more pixels allow more fidelity to the original data – no smearing small features. This argument holds, up to a point. 250M exceeds the bandwidth of the human I (as far as I remember, 10 Mbits per second). At some point it makes sense to spend the money to stop spending money on brute force and start investing in algorithms that help researchers find features.

By: HPCer

HPCer — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:11:05 +0000

Sure it’s cool, but is it useful? How are 250M pixels “easier for the mind to grasp”?