Canon EOS 5D Mark II
ƒ/4.5
16 mm
1/20
250

NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division showed our tour group the hyperwall-2 with its quarter-billion pixel display measuring 23 x 10 feet. It’s the world’s highest-resolution scientific visualization environment.

It’s connected to 2.9 petaflops of compute via 65 miles of cabling (the world’s largest InfiniBand network).

Here’s a video I took of it in action. I used a 16mm lens on the Mark II to take the wide-angle perspective.

Here you see surface current speeds from a 3D ocean state model, with lateral storm waves and fluttering pockets of surface gravity waves. (click photo above to enlarge)

Other examples below.

“And all the roads that lead you there were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding

And after all
You’re my wonderwall” — Oasis

5 responses to “NASA’s Hyperwall-2 Quarter-Gigapixel Display”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    billions and bilions of stars, and many Earth-like planets in a pinky-nail sample of the night sky
    IMG_1069 larger
    a 9 billion pixel image… "and they all probably have planets"

    Zooming in on some of Kepler’s exoplanet discoveries (which surveyed just a palm-sized swath of the star field):
    IMG_1057

    Cool Helicopter Vortices…. simulating a hovering V-22 Osprey rotor in crazy detail
    IMG_1033

    On an separate visit, I saw the V-22 Rotocraft test vehicle used in the giant wind tunnels:
    Rotorcraft Test Vehicle more

    And now, we give you the universe
    IMG_1079 larger

    Reply
  2. In Memoriam: jerryfi_99 Avatar
    In Memoriam: jerryfi_99

    DN (Design News) just came out with an article, and video, on this system-
    http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1395&doc_id=...

    Reply
  3. P^2 - Paul Avatar
    P^2 – Paul

    More impressive than the sheer size of the wall (that’s less than a Tesla worth of LCDs) is the driver hardware that must be needed to coordinate that many pixels.

    But it’s really too bad that more than 15% of that glorious display surface is given over to the muntins formed by the bezels. Bezel-free displays are readily available — I wonder why they didn’t use them?

    Reply
  4. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    sequestration

    Reply
  5. Lars Plougmann Avatar
    Lars Plougmann

    And it’s on wheels! Which makes it the world’s highest-resolution *mobile* scientific visualization environment too.

    Reply

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