Display wall hardware/software overview

From Darwin

Jump to: navigation, search

The Darwin compute facility will include a 60 panel display wall. The display wall will be made from 30" Samsung 305T panels, each with 2560x1600 pixels. The total wall size is 25600 pixels horizontally by 9600 pixels vertically, for a total display area of just over 245 x 106 pixels. The physical wall construction is largely complete and base software configuration efforts are underway.

Contents

Graphics computer hardware

The display panels are driven from a set of 30 IBM Z Pro 9228 computers. Each computer hosts an NVidia GeForce 8800 grapics card. At present each machine has 2GB of main memory and a 160GB local hard drive.

Display Panels

The display panels used in the wall are Samsung 305T panels. Each has a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels.

Software

The display wall system is configured to use the Rocks 4.3 Linux distribution by default. You can read about the Rocks distribution here. Briefly, Rocks provides a basic CentOS based (which is itself based on RedHat) Linux install that is tailored to a distributed cluster system of computers. Graphical programs that run in a Linux/OpenGL/X based environment can be setup to use this system without too much pain!

The page Making Movies contains some example scripts for making movies for the wall.

Available graphics software

An initial set of graphics software for displaying to the wall is installed on the system. The software is described below

The Rocks viz roll

NASA Ames Hyperwall Software

  • bigView
  • bigmovie can play back mpeg movies up to 16383 pixels wide as long as the portion displayed by a single node is no more than 4096x4096.

The UCSD HiPERroll Software

The hiper roll provides cglX, an openGL implementation that can drive a hyper wall, and some applications using it. The online help for cglX can be found here.

Brief summary of steps for using cglX

  • start the daemon on each tile node by typing 'csdstart' on the head node,
  • start 'csconfig' on the head node,
  • in csconfig, load a cluster configuration file, e.g. 2x1.conf,
  • type in a command at the bottom of the window and press 'Start',
  • when done, stop the daemons: 'csdstop'.

Examples sessions

The provided applications are:

tiffviewer

Display and navigate large tiff files. To use, select 'TiffViewer' from the Modules menu in csconfig or type in the command 'tiffviewer -f file.tif' where file.tif is a tiled pyramidal tiff file. Such a file can be created using vips: 

 vips im_vips2tiff imagefile.any output.tif:deflate,tile:256x256,pyramid
MediaViewer

Display multiple still images. For now, call as '/home/cnh/bigView/mv_command.sh directory' to displays all jpeg and png files in the given directory. Do not use on very large (> 4096x4096 ?) images!

VideoBlaster

Show mpeg movies. For now, call as '/home/cnh/bigView/vb_command.sh movie.mpg'. To start playback, hit 'p'. Cannot handle very large frames (> 4096x4096 ?).

OBJViewer

Display and explore geometry files. Call as 'OBJViewer file.obj' where file.obj is an OBJ geometry definition file. An example file is provided in /usr/local/cglX/data/OBJViewer. Cannot handle very large OBJ files.

Physical construction

The video wall, shown in this image Image:Oliver and wall small.jpeg, is approximately 13 feet high and 24 feet wide.

Contacts

If you are interested in using the wall for displaying information please feel free to contact either Chris Hill or Mick Follows. We would like the wall to become a community facility for MIT and welcome either

  • requests that make use of the existing software stack available for the wall
  • requests for experimental activities exploring novel and innovative applications of this facility.
Retrieved from "http://www.darwinproject.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/Display_wall_hardware/software_overview"
Personal tools