UCI?s HIPerWall Profiled on Apple Web site
June 21, 2006 --The HIPerWall at Calit2@UCI is currently featured on the Apple Web site news page, in the ‘Science Stories’ category. The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall, housed in the Center of GRAVITY (Graphics, Visualization and Imaging Technology) at Calit2, is the world’s highest-resolution grid-based display for visualizing and manipulating massive data sets.
HIPerWall is a room-sized display, measuring nearly 23 x 9 feet, which consists of 50 flat-panel display screens and provides a total resolution of 200 million pixels.
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Principal Investigator Falko Kuester and his design team wanted the ability to display a single image across the entire display area as well as the option of displaying many different images or media streams simultaneously. No single display was capable of providing their 100-plus-megapixel resolution requirement, so the team sought a solution with multiple flat panel displays.
They built the visualization platform using a cluster of 25 Power Mac G5s that drive two 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays each. A 26th Power Mac is the HIPerWall’s control node, responsible for managing high-level display functions.
HIPerWall’s extremely high resolution allows it to bring to life a variety of research data – from biomedical to climate datasets, and from numerical data to medical imaging to satellite photography. It is utilized by a wide range of multi-disciplinary researchers at UCI, including those in physics, structural engineering, and theoretical and experimental biomedical engineering.
In addition, the system, which utilizes unique middleware to transport the data, will allow researchers in geographically diverse locations to collaborate on complex experiments.
“HIPerWall provides a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary research teams to jointly visualize and analyze complex scientific data and to correlate information while drawing from a broad range of domain expertise,” Kuester summarizes.
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