High-Resolution Visualization Playback on Tiled Displays
M. Papka and R. Stevens
Futures Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory

Description:
High-resolution movies are needed to visualize the time-dependent results of large-scale computer simulations. This is due to the fact that the amount of data generated does not allow for the real-time visualization because today’s graphics systems are incapable of rendering the output in real-time. The need of the high-resolution output is necessary for the scientist to gain understanding and insight from the results of their simulations. Therefore, it is common for movies to be made in an offline batch mode for playback and review at a later time. Building from this premise others and we have constructed systems for playback of movie files on high-resolution tiled displays. These displays are constructed out of numerous individual desktop systems to form a integrated high-resolution display. Most use of these systems today is with local playback of the movie files.

The goal of the demonstration is the playback of a high-resolution tiled visualization movie over the network. A 6-tile mMural will be part of Argonne’s booth at Supercomputing, the tiled display will be capable of ~ 3072 x 1536 of pixel resolution. A 24bit-uncompressed movie would require approximately 500 MB/s for smooth animation. Currently several bottlenecks exist in a system of this sort, the goal here is to demonstrate that next generation networking infrastructure, such as what is being deployed at SC00 will remove networking as a bottleneck.