NASA's big screen

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Joab Jackson writing in GCN reports on NASA’s new display, Hyperwall-II, a piece of gear that they assert will be the largest high resolution unclassified display in the world.

The display should be operational within the month, [Rupak Biswas, chief of advanced supercomputing at the NASA Ames Research Center] said.

…The Hyperwall-II will be made of 128 LCD monitors, arranged in an 8-by-16 matrix. Collectively, they will generate 245 million pixels, making it, Biswas said, the world’s largest screen.

…Hyperwall-II could be used to display either one gigantic image, or be split into multiple screens. Powering the display will be a 128-node computational cluster, with 1,024 Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, as well as 128 graphical display units. The cluster will be capable of 74 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFlops) and will have 450T of storage to stage the data.

That’s a lot of pixels. The new display replaces a 7×7 tiles, 35 million pixel display.

Trackbacks

  1. […] The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Center in Moffett Field, California is celebrating its 25th anniversary on Monday, April 21.  The events will begin with a morning symposium at NAS highlighting the division’s legacy of accomplishments in high performance computing.  [Rest assured the videos will be displayed on their new viz wall]. […]

Comments

  1. John Leidel says

    To add a few bits to John’s story. Chris Henze and his team of viz junkies at NAS did an exhaustive search on the exact make and model of LCD they wanted to purchase. They were forced to re-engineer an entire room into order to hold this monster. They had to bring in several thousand pounds of ballast to keep it upright!!! I, for one, have seen it and its very impressive. My hat goes off to Chris Henze and co at NASA.

  2. How does a person view 35 million pixels?