The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall project (HIPerWall)
provides unprecedented high-capacity visualization capabilities to
experimental and theoretical researchers. Our primary focus is on Earth
science visualization, but collaborating researchers in fields including
biomedical science and engineering also benefit from HIPerWall's
capabilities.
Display resolution: 25,600 x 8,000 pixels,
204,800,000 pixels total
Earth science datasets often cover large areas of
the planet at high resolution and depth with many values at each grid
point that vary over time, resulting in many gigabytes or terabytes of
data. Visualizing these multi-dimensional, time-varying dataset is both
a challenge to computational/storage infrastructure as well as current
display technologies. With HIPerWall, researchers can see both the broad
view of the data and details concurrently, enabling collaboration and
shared viewing of complex results. A visualization cluster of
high-performance commodity computers transfers and manipulates data
displayed on HIPerWall's 50 display tiles that operate at a combined
resolution of over 200 mega pixels. The visualization cluster also
receives real-time simulation data from UCI's Earth System Modeling
Facility, an IBM supercomputer funded by NSF in 2003, as well as other
sources. HIPerWall's ability to display extremely high-resolution
datasets drives and provides focus for ongoing research into management,
transfer, and visualization of terabyte-scale data. While the hardware
infrastructure of HIPerWall is challenging and matches the state of the
art, the data handling and distributed visualization capabilities needed
to support HIPerWall's capacity are well beyond current practice.
