The largest video display in the world, located on the UC San Diego campus is made of 70 tiled 30-inch monitors.
Inside a shipping container a Sun Modular Datacenter awaits its cube mates: up to 280 servers and other equipment that will turn the container into the GreenLight energy-monitoring instrument.
There's no point arguing whose is biggest or has the most pixels when it comes to the size of video displays. A research team at the University of California, San Diego, has just unveiled the largest system in the world: almost 32-feet wide and 7.5-feet tall with 287 million pixels of screen resolution. That's more than one active pixel for every U.S. citizen, according to the 2000 Census.
But there will be no Super-Bowl watching on this screen. The Great Wall of visual displays, which researchers call HIPerSpace, for Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space, is an advanced research space with applications in Earth systems science, chemistry, astrophysics, medicine, forensics, art and archaeology, and enables work in computer graphics, visualization, networking, data compression, streaming and human-computer interaction. Other scientists model the impact of seismic activity on structures, climate-change predictions, and the structure of the human brain, for example.
Scientists in different locations can gather simultaneously in front of their displays and explore, analyze and collaborate in unison while viewing real-time, rendered graphics of large data sets, video streams and telepresence videoconferencing. "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." said principal scientist Falko Kuester at UC San Diego's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
The system features 70 high-resolution Dell 30-inch displays, arranged in 14 columns of five displays each. Each 'tile' has a resolution of 2,560 by 1,600 pixels—bringing the combined, visible resolution to 35,640 by 8,000 pixels, or more than 286.7 million pixels in all. If you include the bits covered by the framing, the total image size is a whopping 348 million pixels.
The giant display handles data sets so big, of course it needs a hefty engine. It is powered by 18 Dell XPS 710/720 computers with Intel quad-core central processing units and dual nVIDIA FX5600 graphics processing units. In all, a total of 100 processor cores and 38 GPUs give the HIPerSpace system roughly 20 teraflops of peak processing power and 10 terabytes of storage.
On top of that, the wall is connected by high-performance optical networking to visual portals around the world, which drastically increases the processing power. HIPerSpace is the largest of these "OptIPortals" in the world," said Calit2 Director Larry Smarr, who envisions a vast, global "OptIPlanet Collaboratory" based on such optical supercomputing networks and high-resolution displays.
Hot Processing
Data-rich scientific computing undoubtedly draws a lot of juice, mainly for power and cooling. By one estimate, every dollar spent on power for IT equipment requires another dollar to be spent on cooling.
"If we are going to continue to allow ourselves the benefits of advances in computing, we need to understand power and cooling requirements much better," said Tom DeFanti, a research scientist at Calit2 and principal investigator of a new energy conserving project called "GreenLight."
Although the IT industry has begun to develop strategies for "greening" major corporate data centers, most of the cyberinfrastructure on a university campus involves a complex network of ad hoc and suboptimal energy environments, with clusters placed in small departmental facilities. Because some scientific computing jobs need more powerful processors, some can do with less memory, and some can use specialized processors, the trick is to optimally configure a computing cluster for each job through virtualization techniques, DeFanti said.
The system will consist of two Sun Modular Datacenter S20s located inside large shipping containers that can accommodate up to 280 servers taken from research departments around the campus. To eliminate the need for air conditioning, each Sun MD's closed-loop water-cooling system uses built-in heat exchanges between equipment racks to channel air flow. This allows the unit to cool 25 kilowatts per rack—roughly five times the cooling capacity of typical datacenters.
