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Outer space: Nasa's multi-screen wonder wall

2010-03-29 13:47 BJT

You may think you've got a pretty good widescreen set-up at home, but nothing comes close to Nasa's hyperwall-2.

Used for a multitude of purposes, from weather and national disaster observations to displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope - as shown here - the quarter-of-a-billion-pixel, 128-screen, 23ft-wide LCD array is the world's highest-resolution display system.

Hyperwall-2 is spread across 128 monitors and is used for a multitude of purposes such as displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope (as shown above)
Hyperwall-2 is spread across 128 monitors and is used for a multitude of 
purposes such as displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope 
(as shown above)

Installed at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in 2008, the system is powered by 128 graphics-processing units with 1,024 processor cores, running at speeds of up to 74 teraflops - that's 74 trillion calculations per second, the equivalent of over 300 PS3 consoles.

But all this power isn't being used to play giant games of Modern Warfare 2 - it enables scientists to analyse massive data sets and run simulations that might take weeks on lesser computers.

Hyperwall-2 is spread across 128 monitors and is used for a multitude of purposes such as displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope (as shown above)
Hyperwall-2 is spread across 128 monitors and is used for a multitude of 
purposes such as displaying images from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope 
(as shown above)

Editor: Zheng Limin | Source: CCTV.com