University of California, Irvine

HIPerWall: New Vistas in Scientific Visualization

By Frank Lacombe

The HIPerWall displays HeLa cancer cells in exquisite detail. Members of the team that created the HIPerWall, from left: Kai-Uwe Doerr, Stephen Jenks, Falko Kuester, and Christopher Knox. Team members not shown: Greg Dawe, Dirk Groeneveld, Sung-Jin Kim, Evan Klinger, Frank Wessel, Charlie Zender. Microscopy courtesy NCMIR at UCSD.

Innovative ways of envisioning scientific phenomena are on the rise in data-rich research environments. Case in point is the Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall, or HIPerWall, at University of California, Irvine’s Center of GRAVITY (Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging Technology). The HIPerWall, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is a massively tiled, grid-based display built using fifty 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays and twenty-five Power Mac G5 computers. This powerful display system allows researchers to view and manipulate their data sets at extremely high resolutions and collaborate with other scientists in new and exciting ways.

Basic Design Decisions

Dr. Falko Kuester, director of the Center of GRAVITY and the principal investigator for the HIPerWall project, and his team wanted to build a large, collaborative visualization platform capable of displaying static images, image sequences in the form of movies and animations, and three-dimensional, time-varying data in real time. They wanted the ability to display a single image across the entire display area as well as to display many different images or media streams simultaneously. Since no single display provided anything close to their 100-plus-megapixel resolution requirement, the team sought a solution with multiple flat panel displays.

“The decision to adopt the Mac platform was based on many factors that included the form factor and resolution of the Apple Cinema Displays, a robust UNIX-based operating system that was tightly integrated with open source components, and the ease of administration and use.”

For Kuester and the HIPerWall team, the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display’s resolution of 2560x1600 pixels (4 megapixels), narrow bezel relative to the viewable screen area, and built-in color calibration made it the optimal display for their needs. The fifty 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays yield a total display resolution of 200 megapixels, breaking the previous 100-megapixel world record — by doubling it.

Video imagery displayed on the HIPerWall can theoretically range from the 640x480 image from an Apple iSight camera to a single 200-megapixel video stream, although the latter is far beyond the limits of current video technology.

The HIPerWall team decided on the Power Mac G5 to drive the display wall — with each workstation (25 total) supporting two 30-inch displays. They designated one additional Power Mac G5 to serve as the control node responsible for managing high-level display functions.

Another important consideration was ease of use — especially for a research platform like HIPerWall that would be used by scientists with varying levels of technical expertise and systems knowledge. The combination of Mac OS X’s intuitive interface and the custom AppleScript-based administrative console made it easy even for new users to operate the HIPerWall display system.

Team member Frank Wessel sums up: “The decision to adopt the Mac platform was based on many factors that included the form factor and resolution of the Apple Cinema Displays, a robust UNIX-based operating system that was tightly integrated with open source components, and the ease of administration and use.”

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