Wednesday, August 22, 2007

220 Million Pixels on New System at UCSD

Filed under: Informatics

A new super high resolution display system developed at UCSD is going to allow scientists to visualize data like never before, and make their neighbors with that new HDTV jealous. Here's a little about about the system from the press release:

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world - with a screen resolution up to 220 million pixels.

The new HIPerSpace system between Irvine and San Diego is joined together via high-performance, dedicated optical networking that clocks in at up to two gigabits per second (2Gbps). The systems use the same type of graphics rendering technology, from industry partner NVIDIA. The "graphics super cluster" being developed at UCSD consists of 80 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics processing units (GPUs). "The graphics and computational performance of these cards is quite astounding," said Kuester. "Putting the theoretical computational performance of the cluster at almost 40 teraflops. To put that into context, the top-rated supercomputer in the world five years ago was operating at that same speed. While these are purely theoretical numbers, the comparison clearly hints at capabilities of this new cluster that go far beyond generating impressive visual information."

The processing power will come in handy for the kinds of large-scale applications that are likely to make use of the HIPerSpace system. Calit2 will make the displays available to teams of scientists or engineers dealing with very large data sets, from multiple gigabytes to terabytes, notably in the Earth sciences, climate prediction, biomedical engineering, genomics, and brain imaging. "The higher-resolution displays allow researchers to take in both the broad view of the data and the minutest details, all at the same time," said Kuester. "HIPerSpace also allows us to experiment on the two campuses with distributed teams that can collaborate and share insights derived from a better understanding of complex results. This capability will allow researchers at two UC campuses to collaborate more intensively with each other, and eventually with other campuses, thanks to the rapid rollout of OptIPortals outside of California."

Read the press release here...

More: Rocketing into HIPerSpace: New Visualization System at UC San Diego...

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