Can a monitor ever be too big? A computer ever too fast? NEVER! And while I’m achingly fond of handheld computers, I’m awed by the massive power and size of the Texas Advanced Computer Center’s Visualization Laboratory.
This mind boggling display of technology exists to provide tools that make it feasible for researchers to explore large amounts of data on very large display screens. Scientist use the Viz Lab to see their data in amazing new ways…leading them to discoveries in fields like computational engineering, mathematics, biology, geology and chemistry. Imagine, being able to explore the vastness of the galaxy or the microscopic intricacies of a human cell.
The lab is housed in a room that resembles a personal media room on steroids with a 180-degree cylindrical screen. How big is the screen? Are you sitting down? Would you believe 10-foot-high with a diameter of 24-feet? The images are projected from three front projectors and ten multiple screen rear projectors. This 2,900 square-foot lab sits on some of the most amazing hardware on the planet.
Maverick, our terascale remote visualization system, consists of a Sun E25K with 128 processors, 512 Gigabytes of shared memory, and with access to over a Terabyte of storage. The cpu deployed in the system is Sun SPARC IV processor technology, with a clock speed of 1.05 GHz, and capable of issuing 2 floating point operations per clock tick.
I’ll never forget the day I donned the 3D glasses and watched live renderings of complex data on the screen. If a “picture is worth a thousand words”, than a 3D live rendering is priceless!
What I love even more, is thinking about what’s next? What exciting creative experiences could we create given this amazing technology? How could we use these tools to explore the arts? I’ve heard that a dancer has used the lab with a 3D tracking system to dance with technology.
So, the next time you are in Austin, along with sightseeing at Zilker Park, Toy Joy and Sixth Street, drop me a line and I’ll sign us up for a field trip to the Viz Lab!
P.S. No, the 3D glasses are not the kind you use in the movie theatre, they are CrystalEyes LCD glasses for stereoscopic viewing.