June 26, 2008
Nasa simulates the stars with 128-screen hyperwall
I like the extra desktop space of having two monitors on my desk, but I am suffering screen-envy at what Nasa scientists can now feast their eyes on at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
The 128-screen hyperwall-2, unveiled on Wednesday, is capable of rendering 250m-pixel graphics and is “the world’s highest resolution scientific visualisation and data exploration environment.”
The liquid crystal display wall is 23 feet wide and 10 feet tall. It allows high-resolution examination of simulations such as global weather and black-hole collisions.
The set up is 100 times more powerful than the first version of the hyperwall installed in 2002, with 49 screens. Nasa says it has “128 graphics processing units and 1,024 processor cores, with 74 teraflops (one teraflop equals one trillion floating point operations per second) of peak processing power and a data storage capacity of 475 terabytes (one terabyte equals one trillion bytes).”
That equates to the graphics power of 600 video game consoles.
Presumably, Advanced Micro Devices had a hand in this as a partner of Colfax International, the installer. I find this much more impressive than its Cinema 2.0 demonstration last week, where AMD dubiously claimed a new milestone in cinema with its latest graphics cards.
The Nasa hyperwall seems a supernova in comparison.
