At 31.8 feet wide and 7.5 feet tall (9.7m x 2.3m), the HIPerSpace is already being used by a wide range of research groups at UC San Diego, which want to be able to view their largest data sets while also drilling down to the smallest elements on the same screen. A team from the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) went to Florence to laser-scan the main hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the center's researchers at Calit2 can now manipulate the computer model, depicting all 2.5 billion data points and explore the space in real time. Other scientists model the impact of seismic activity on structures, climate-change predictions, the structure of the human brain, to name a few such applications.
In order to run simulations and explore data interactively, the developers of the HIPerSpace have built into the environment a large computer and graphics processing cluster. The wall is powered by 18 Dell XPS 710/720 computers with Intel quad-core central processing units (CPUs) and dual nVIDIA FX5600 graphics processing units (GPUs). A head node and six streaming nodes complete the hardware pool for a total of 100 processor cores and 38 GPUs. Thus the HIPerSpace system offers roughly 20 teraflops of peak processing power and 10 terabytes of storage, but its access to computing and storage capacity increases dramatically because the wall is an integral part of the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter infrastructure on, and beyond, the UCSD campus, including the so-called "OptIPortal" tiled display systems (some with as few as four tiles) that are the primary end-point for scientists using the infrastructure.
“The HIPerSpace is the largest OptIPortal in the world,” said Calit2 Director Larry Smarr, a pioneer of supercomputing applications and principal investigator on the OptIPuter project. “The wall is connected by high-performance optical networking to the remote OptIPortals worldwide, as well as all of the compute and storage resources in the OptIPuter infrastructure, creating the basis for an OptIPlanet Collaboratory."
“We have full access to the OptIPuter resources, which drastically increase the CPUs, GPUs and storage at our disposal,” added Kuester. “Nodes are interconnected via a dedicated gigabit subnet and tied into the OptIPuter fabric with a 10 Gigabits-per-second [Gbps] uplink.”
In addition to 10Gbps connectivity to resources at nine locations on the UCSD campus, including Calit2 and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the OptIPuter provides the HIPerSpace system with up to 2Gbps in dedicated fiber connectivity with its precursor HIPerWall at Calit2 on the UC Irvine campus (and its roughly 205 million pixels). As a result, scientists can gather simultaneously in front of the walls in San Diego and Irvine and explore, analyze and collaborate in unison while viewing real-time, rendered graphics of large data sets, video streams and telepresence videoconferencing across nearly half a billion pixels.
HIPerSpace is serving as a visual analytics research space with applications in Earth systems science, chemistry, astrophysics, medicine, forensics, art and archaeology, while enabling fundamental work in computer graphics, visualization, networking, data compression, streaming and human-computer interaction.
In particular, HIPerSpace is a research testbed for visualization frameworks needed for massive resolution digital wallpaper displays of the near future that will leverage bezel-free tiles and provide uninterrupted visual content.
Click on Next Page to learn more about CGLX framework (Cross-Platform Cluster Graphics Library)
