Scientists have no problem generating immense data sets, but visualizing the data on a large scale is a challenge that requires a display system of equally immense resolution. Now, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, has announced the construction of the Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space (HIPerSpace)—the highest resolution display system in the world.
The display itself is 31.8 × 7.5 ft (9.7 × 2.3 m), and uses 70 high-resolution Dell 30 in. displays, arranged in 14 columns of five displays each. Each “tile” has a resolution of 2560 × 1600 pixels, for a combined, visible resolution of 35,640 × 8000 pixels, or more than 286.7 million pixels in all. The HIPerSpace display has 10% more pixels than the world’s second-largest display, constructed recently at the Advanced Supercomputing Division of NASA Ames Research Center (Mountain View, CA). The HIPerSpace system offers approximately 20 teraflops of peak processing power and 10 terabytes of storage, but actual computing power and storage capacity is much higher, as the wall is an integral part of the National Science Foundation–funded OptIPuter infrastructure that extends beyond the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Contact Doug Ramsey at [email protected].