Design & Use Of Large Tiled Display [James Morrison]
•
0 likes•509 views
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Design & Use Of Large Tiled Display [James Morrison]
Similar to Design & Use Of Large Tiled Display [James Morrison] (20)
More from University of the Highlands and Islands
More from University of the Highlands and Islands (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Design & Use Of Large Tiled Display [James Morrison]
- 1. Designing and using a large tiled display for research visualisation James Morrison Systems Administrator Greenspace Research, Lews Castle College
- 2. Large tiled display • Large tiled displays are a group of monitors usually tiled as a grid ( display wall ) controlled generally by a cluster of computers
- 3. Comparison with projection Advantages: • Greatly increased resolution • No bulb lifetime • A cluster of computers which can also be used for data processing • Brightness, works well in a variety of light conditions Disadvantages: • Bezels ( edge of monitors )
- 4. Design considerations Aims ( where possible ): Open source software - that could be modified for our purposes and not require support contracts Standard off the shelf components -that are easily obtainable and reuseable.
- 5. Installed Examples OptIPortal Project in the United States a National Science Foundation funded project for building a series of display walls and high speed communication links for collaboration. Along with are a number of European and Australian partners.
- 6. Hardware 6 high end Dell workstations consisting of 1 frontend and 5 tile nodes. Each tile node has two video cards with dual outputs, each of the 4 outputs of a tile node are connected to one Dell 30” monitor. 20 Dell 30” monitors arranged in a 5 wide by 4 high grid giving a maximum resolution of 13250 by 6400 or 84.8 megapixels
- 7. Network Diagram Frontend / Master Slaves / Tile Nodes Dual Link DVI Gigabit Ethernet Interconnect
- 8. Software Rocks Cluster Distribution is a Linux distribution designed specifically for Linux clusters based on Centos. Rocks is customised with additional package called Rolls. In this case we added the Viz Roll which is intended for large tiled displays
- 9. Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment SAGE developed by the University of Chicago is a distributed as part of the Rocks Viz Roll and is a core part of our use of the Display Wall. It has an array of applications to can be used with the display wall and simplified User Interface
- 10. Chromium - Google Earth Using Chromium ( an OpenGL implementation ) we can display the 3D output of any application that uses OpenGL including Google Earth
- 11. VNC Virtual Desktop By using SAGE’s VNC Viewer and the X VNC Server we can create Virtual Desktop that are suitable for the aspect ratio, size and any resolution.
- 12. Usability One click scripts: Display of CFD simulations and thermographic imagery Running VNC with a default windows desktop Running Google Earth with specific overlays Auto display of charted outputs from weather stations
- 13. Thoughts Fast Interconnect Video Capture Bezel Size, Resolution and Screen Distance
- 14. Any Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Display – Cluster The computers powering the display wall are organised in a cluster, one master or frontend in this called Viz and a number of slaves or tile nodes connected to the monitors.
- Widely used in academia, government for all types of high performance computing The Rocks Viz Roll allows you to setup a basic visualisation cluster relatively easily. There are Rocks based commands and shared drives which simply administration of the cluster. Rocks is a good starting point for setting up any kind of cluster but one problem is that Rocks works on a relatively slow release cycle so if you want the lastest libraries your going to have to compile
- Known as SAGE, by the Electronic Visualisation Laboratory A simplifed User interface to the wall which can be run on any machine VNC (Virtual Network Computing) – Allows any local machine with a VNC server running to display its screen on the display wall. SAGE also includes an image viewer, pdf viewer, movie player and allows you to save these as predefined layouts and the ability to develop your own applications for the wall
- Dedicated visualisation tools like Paraview Ensight, we found that with the software out group was using it was easier to display the actual application which has inbuilt visualisation capabilities was best
- We introduced a basic windows desktop machine that acts as an interface to the wall and allows users to display that desktop with one click, more advanced users can access all the functionality of the wall by remote login.A certain amount of training is required to get people familiar with the system.
- The main bottleneck within the display wall is the interconnect which is standard Gigabit Ethernet with an unmanaged switch. So when video is being played the frame rate suffers small amount, we have been able to compensate for this by adding additional network cards to the frontend and bonding them together to act as one. If were to upgrade one part of the wall it would be the network interconnect and have the gigabit replaced by 10 gigabit ethernet. The other upgrade would be a good video capture card and machine to allow local video sources to be streamed directly to the wall. Depending on the requirements slim bezel samsung displays could be used but these are limited in terms of resolution 1300x768 so the pixel density is a quarter of that of the Dell monitor used Wireless mouse control of the VNC session is very useful and a KVM for the cluster is incredibly useful when reinstalling or debuggin problems