Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the hardware-to-lust-after dept.
BlackHat linked us to IBMs
Deep View, a
research system for rendering and other advanced applications (Q3A). The
PC is 8 Linux boxes in a rack, which is needed to generate the content for the
T221 display which operates at 3840x2400.
140 comments
This is a software solution
by
ObviousGuy
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Not an OS solution. Linux is peripheral to the whole article.
-- I have been pwned because my/. password was too easy to guess.
Re:This is a software solution
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The Scaleable Graphics Engine on the right in the picture is most definitely a piece of hardware. The Linux OpenGL drivers have been replaced such that they do a distributed rendering, and then the rendering is composited by the SGE and sent to the monitor.
Re:This is a software solution
by
ObviousGuy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I knew I misphrased that as soon as I hit submit. This is an advancement in algorithms (hardware-based in this case), rather than any special functionality of an OS.
-- I have been pwned because my/. password was too easy to guess.
Re:This is a software solution
by
You're+All+Wrong
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No need to retract, Linux isn't the most important part of the set-up at all.
I did't see anywhere where it said what processor it's using though. A 866MHz what?
Chips at that speed include PIII and Alpha 21264, but not as far as I know a Power or PPC speed (or HPPA, MIPS, or Sparc).
I know Alphas are popular in render-farms, but have gone 'out of fashion' now. Are IBM _embarassed_ by their choice of processor?
YAWIAR.
--
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Re:This is a software solution
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
YAY!! More lunix!! YAY!!!
Re:This is a software solution
by
YeeHarr
·
· Score: 1
The 'SGE' is similar to SGI's compositor which is a product you can buy off the shelf which composits the output of multiple graphics cards in hardware.
The IBM research device does some other things that the SGI IP compositor doesn't - but at least the SGI compositor has been available for around a year - so you can use it today.
(Not that I am SGI biased or anything:-)
Re:This is a software solution
by
DavidRavenMoon
·
· Score: 2
I did't see anywhere where it said what processor it's using though. A 866MHz what?
Most of IBMs big machines seem to run on PPC chips of one form or another, and 866 is a common speed for G3 CPUs.
Deep Blue ran on the old PPC604e's!
I would think they are using IBM processors.
-- --
if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
I knew that such speeds were possible, it's just hta Apple etc. seem to be quite poor at posting SPEC results. It seems like intel and dell are in competition with each other to see who can post more SPEC results each month. If they can fill the table with 10000 P4 results, then noone will be able to see that an IBM Power system's rocking the #1 spot currently. Cunning, and devious...
Anyway, thanks for the heads-up PPC-wise.
YAWIAR.
--
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Sounds Like
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Why, do you have performance benchmarks comparing the experimental, non production DeepView with the commercially available InfinitePerformance visualization system?
Re:Sounds Like
by
YeeHarr
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have seen this display driven by one Octane2.
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/octane2/
Not one rack of 8 PCs and one half rack of some graphics engine.
It was drawing the full display at about 30fps.
It was as easy to use as any other workstation rather than the 'interesting' mix of 8 pcs in a rack and some other half rack of graphics stuff.
The hardest thing was to read the tiny little fonts on the screen (the display is 200dpi IIRC) - you need a magnifying glass (or of course you could increase the font size).
The Octane2 can do this because you can install two V12 graphics engines each with a dual channel adapter.
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/octane2/dual_cha nn el.html
SGI software stiches the cards together transparently.
It is a beautiful display.
The amuzing/annoying thing about these sorts of announcements is that customers have been using SGI stuff to do this for the last 8 years or so.
If you were on the leading edge of this kind of work would you wait that long for some kludged together solution which might work if you have enough Duct tape to stick it together?
Or would you pay the extra cash for a solution that works and gives you a huge jump on your competition.
The sort of software layer that can be used to make these four channels (two channels from each graphics card) into one display is stuff like:
http://www.sgi.com/software/multipipe/sdk/
Oh yeah - and re your 'every table comment'. The Octane2 fits on one table - it doesn't surround the table like the IBM stuff.
just showing some quite simple models being rotated in Catia.
my P4 can do that in Pro/E too.
or did i miss something important?
Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
anticypher
·
· Score: 4, Funny
9.2 megaPixel, up to 56 Hz refresh in a 22 inch LCD screen. Want!
This is now very high on my luxury wish list. When is the next IT bubble scheduled to happen again? I have to start my plan to get rich on other people's stupidity and greed so I can afford a system like this.
the AC
-- Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
maxwell+demon
·
· Score: 1
Really cool would be to have all that in _one_ computer. And, of course, at 100Hz refresh rate.
-- The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
be-fan
·
· Score: 2
Well, the referesh rate on an LCD doesn't matter that much. 56 HZ doesn't cause any flicker. And its low enough ( 25 ms response time) that you probably wouldn't see any ghosting in games.
-- A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
CTho9305
·
· Score: 1
but 56 fps is the lower limit for perfect smoothness.. a little above 60 is ideal.
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Alright then. Knock the res down a notch.
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
be-fan
·
· Score: 2
We'll, its more like 60 fps average, though. For most people as long as it doesn't go below 40-50 fps minimum it looks fine.
-- A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Re:Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
by
CTho9305
·
· Score: 1
No, if you look (well, if I look) it chops if the minimum goes below about 60. I would rather have a card that has a minimum of 60 fps and a max of 65 than a card with an average of 200fps but routinely drops to 40-50.
Quoth the article: since no single graphics adapter has the necessary horsepower and bandwidth to feed a 9.2 million pixel display (at 41Hz using 24 bits per pixel)
Hmm, doing the math: 3840*2400 pixels = 9216000 Pixels per Frame 9216000*3 (3=24/8) = 27648000 Bytes per Frame 27648000*8 = 221184000 Bits Per Frame 221184000 (bpf) * 41 (fps) = 9068544000 Bits per Second 9068544000/1024 = 8856000 KiloBits per Second (approx) 8856000/1024 = 8648 MegaBits per Second (approx) 8648/1024 = Just over 8 GigaBits per Second
Now, with newer DX9-type graphics Adapters, and AGP 8x, we can do about 2.5 to 3 Gigabits per second just now (over the AGP Bus, haven't calculated Actual Display bitrates!)... Applying Moore's law, (theorum, whatever!), we can safely say that this kind of horsepower will be common in a single, average, desktop PC inside of two to three years.
Sure, this may be a boost to Hollywood today - but soon enough, it will be pretty commonplace technology. (Though I'm betting the most expensive item in that bunch of kit is the actual LCD Display, not the kit driving it!).
-- Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Re:Bandwidth...
by
be-fan
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Umm, just over 8 gigabits per second is nothing. That's about 1 GB/sec, and an 8x AGP (2 GB/sec) graphics adapter (Radeon 9700) would have no trouble handling that data rate. Besides, you don't have to pump *all* of that data over the AGP bus. You send only display lists and textures and whatnot over the AGP bus. The local graphics card (where the actual data rate would hit near 1 GB/sec) has (on a Radeon 9700) about 20 GB/sec of bandwidth.
-- A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You're right of course... As a matter of habit, I tend to think about this kind of data-transfer in GigaBits per second - I totally forgot that AGP4x is specced in GigaBytes per second.
Time for a Homer Moment....... Doh!
-- Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Also, why did you do pixels-per-frame * (24/8) only only to multiple it back by eight on the next line?
Re:Bandwidth...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Moore's Law ended dood. Moore himself has said as much. Low-K is a lab trick that will be ready for production in 30 years.
I repeat Moore's Law has been repealed. Do not make assumptions based on Moore's Law in the future.
OT: IBM SawMill project
by
JPriest
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
SawMill is an IBM project to build an operating system around the L4 microkernel (-kernel). The project web site is short on details of how the project is going so I was wondering if anyone else is keeping tabs on it?
-- Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Re:OT: IBM SawMill project
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The L4 microkernel puts the Linux kernel to shame. There is a distro called Debian Hurd. Hurd is a set of servers that runs on Mach but is slowly being ported over to L4. The home page for the L4 Hurd port is here. There is also an L4Linux project that runs Linux as an app in user space over top of L4, more info on that is here
This used to be almost exclusively SGI's territory.
A few years ago I attended a presentation at NCSA where Larry Smarr was talking about their plans for a similar display, driven by about $1M of SGI boxes. I think they wanted to call it "The Great Wall of Power".
Some future PlayStation "n" will do this in your living room.
Isn't Moore's Law great?
Which leads me to ask, have we ever had a/. poll on your favourite law? -Moore's -Murphy's -Amdahl's -Newton's - Hooke's -Boyle's -whatever?
Re:Exactly!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Moore's Law sucks donkey testicular!
When will I have my own nuclear plant in my backyard for the price of a 6 pack of beer?
Why not just turn your monitor on and off as fast as you can? You'll save a lot of money.
-- --
http://frobnosticate.com
Use for Gigabit Ethernet
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
From the system hardware page Gigabit Ethernet, for transfer of the rendered pixels to the display.
Thats just badass.
Re:Use for Gigabit Ethernet
by
jaymz168
·
· Score: 0
Actually, the Gigabit Ethernet is being used to transfer the rendered pixels from each node in the cluster to the SGE are buffered and whatnot and then sent to the display through up to 8 DVI outputs.
From the hardware page : In the current Deep View configuration, the rendered pixels are sent from each node in the cluster to the SGE over a Gigabit Ethernet link, and we use four of the synchronized DVI outputs to drive the T221 at full resolution.
SGE is not the monitor it's the graphics subsystem.
Have you noticed that image thumbnail is faked?
by
marat
·
· Score: 1
It states Click to see the full resolution image (1086x1058) but the full resolution image (407 kilos) was already loaded to show you a thumbnail. Funny to see this bad web-design on IBM's page about new graphic system (kind of marketing?). Or people just forgot why it's polite to use thumbnails in the Net?
Re:Have you noticed that image thumbnail is faked?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
He did have a good point, it's pretty boneheaded to fake thumbnails by using the full size image and having the browser scale it down.
Standard cinema runs at 24 Hz non-Interlaced, domestic TV at 25 (UK) or 30 (US) Hz Interlaced (50 or 60 Hz effective, though only half of the image is rendered in each frame), neither of these show a visible strobe effect!
Also, the switching time of the Transistors in the Display Matrix, coupled with signal delays which are bound th be present in the Display Driver Unit (even if they are pico- or fento-second delays), will add up to a smooth(er) experience anyways.
Sure, the display would be more realistic at 100Hz or faster, but really, it's not vital... The human eye only resolves 12 to 15 frames per second, and (depending on the ambient light level, and image contrast levels) about 11 to 15 million distinct colours.
-- Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
The human eye only resolves 12 to 15 frames per second
Where did you get that from?? It's easily proved wrong by the fact that you can see the flicker of a 60Hz monitor, but even then, if that's all you could see it would be impossible to play sports (such as hitting a baseball).
The whole "what is the frame rate of the eye" question is an incredibly complex one that I won't try and do here (yet again). Suffice it to say that it's not as simple as "frame rate".
-- Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
No, it's not quite that simple - and perhaps my original response was biased by the fact that I am Partially Sighted (6/36 or 20/120 depending on your side of the Pond), and hence have a totally different view on the world to most of you!
Most people I have spoken to only 'see' the 60Hz flicker of a CRT in artificially lit conditions, and report that the flicker disappears in Natural Lighting - the visible component of the flicker is caused by resonance between the light-source and the CRT.
As for sports - you don't need to resolve images faster than 15 'cycles' per second - your brain will quite happily fill in the missing detail about an object's position, be it a Baseball or whatever, quite unconciously - you don't have to see it to know it's there and where it's going!
-- Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
your brain will quite happily fill in the missing detail about an object's position, be it a Baseball or whatever, quite unconciously - you don't have to see it to know it's there and where it's going!
Spoken like someone who doesn't play sports (no offense). Anticipation is certainly an important part, but only a minor part. You will NOT be able to hit a 80-90 MPH curve ball by just watching the angle coming from the pitcher's hand. Think about the margin for error in hitting a baseball, and then think about the angle you are watching the baseball come in at, which is basically straight at you.
Or heck, an easier experiment is to have someone toss a ball to you and close your eyes at the halfway point when it reaches the top of the arc. It will NOT be easy to catch, but by your theory is should be since you have data from half the travel of the ball.
This really shouldn't be surprising. Which would be easier to design... a device that tracks a ball and then tries to predict where a grabber should be to catch it, or a device that watches the flight of the ball and continuously updates the grabber position based on where it sees the ball going? Again, anticipation is certainly a part of it since you want a rought approximation of where the ball is going to be, but it's not nearly enough data to be accurate.
-- Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I've gotta call bullshit there. The only case where lighting would have any effect on the perception of a CRT would be its intensity, and even then its effect would be indirect.
Your eyes are much more sensitive to flicker in the periphery than looking dead on. If the room is very bright, your eyes will be less dialated, and you'll be less sensitive to the flicker of your monitor.
Artificial light does have it's own flicker component, but that won't interfere with a crt because it doesn't depend on the reflection of that light for its operation. Now if you take an HP48 calculator, you will probably notice some flicker in rooms lit mostly with flourescent lights. The refresh on flourescents (in the US anyway) are close to the refresh of the reflective lcd on the HP48, hence the banding.
Another big factor on flicker is the rate of decay of the phospher elements in your monitor. The slower the glow decay, the less likley you are to see a flicker--the pixel is still glowing from the last time it was hit, when it is struck again. The longer this decay, the lower refresh rate you can get away with from a flicker point of view.
However, now you suffer from smearing or stuttering (sometimes called ghosting). The optimal setup would be a phospher coating with nearly infinite decay rate, operating with an infinite refresh rate.
Television, here in the US is refreshed at something like 30Hz (non hdtv). The reasons you don't see the flicker are: 1) slow decay rate of the phospher. 2) you are usually 5 or 6 feet away from a tv when you are watching--so it isn't in your peripheral vision. 3) While big screen tv's are getting more common, most people are still below the 36 inch mark, which also means it is mostly in your non-peripheral vision.
Try this: Go up to like a 13 inch tv or something small like that, turn it on to some show that has a lot of white to it. Stand about 1 foot or so away, and look just above the TV. I guarantee that you will see flicker. Some people are more sensitve to flicker than others, and it will depend a little on the TV, but at 30hz, I imagine everyone in the world can see it.
LCD--I think all of the consumer LCDs out today suck as far as pixel decay. I don't know the reason, capacitance maybe, but they suck. Much slower decay than CRTs. On many LCDs today, you still can't tell if you have "mouse trails" turned on or off (in ms windows). So that is why you don't see flicker as much at such low refresh rates on LCDs. There may be other reasons too... I don't know.
If you had read the whole post, you would know that at 1 foot away from a 13 inch TV, I, personally, would have the same visual perception as you would at 6 feet. In short, I would be able to resolve practically bugger all on the display, let alone percieve any Flicker! In order to even use a PC, I have to sit less than three inches from the CRT, and I have never in over 15 years noticed considerable flicker or storbe effects - Except in cases where the CRT has been located directly underneath office strip-lighting.
What kind of LCD's have you been using recently? The last time I had the 'do I have mouse trails on-or-off' feeling was with a DSTN type LCD, over five years ago! Modern TFT Breed LCD's (particularly those from the past 18 months or so) exhibit excellent refresh charachteristics - to the point where it is quite comfortable to watch complete DVD on the LCD, rather than pushing it out to a CRT.
A Key reason for flicker on US Television is the choice of Colour encoding (NTSC, as opposed to here in the UK where PAL is used). NTSC is much more prone to interference in the Chrominance burst due to it's encodiing system, which causes the signals for odd- and even-fields to interfere, leading to excess blurring and flicker. PAL Encoding does not suffer so badly from these artefacts, due to the fact that the odd- and even-field Chrominance Bursts are out of phase with each other by 120 Degrees. This is probably why I have only ever heard Yanks complaining about flicker on Domestic TV - It doesn't Happen nearly so badly with PAL Anyway.
In the US, A Full-Frame refresh occurs at 30 Hz, but the Field refresh (the important number here!) is at 60Hz. Remember that traditional broadcast TV, and analogue Video encoding is all Interlaced. (For the UK Frame = 25 Hz and Field = 50 Hz).
Remember where the Ambient and CRT Light all ends up - the Retina. Most flicker artefacts are at the perceptual level, or are caused by interference as different flicker components enter the eye, and not by an individual item of technology.
Probably the most important factor in assessing whether a given person 'sees' a flicker from a given source is not the light-source itself, but that persons eye. If like me, you suffer from a number of combined optical deficiencies, including Astigmatism, Albinism, Nystagmus, Short Sight and Central-vision blind-spots, I guarantee you that you will percieve flicker in a much different way to someone with the textbook '20-20' eye.
There are a significant number of factors which account for visual flicker - and Experience in the world tells me that you are quite Wrong to discount the effect of Ambient Lighting on percieved flicker from a CTR/LCD Display.
You can say what you want, and you can Mod this post all the way to oblivion, but you cannot change how anyone else sees the world.
-- Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Hey listen, all you said was that you were "partially sighted", which doesn't mean squat, and that your vision was 20/120. Maybe you meant something else, but 20/120 in the US means you can almost get by without glasses at all.
"You can say what you want, and you can Mod this post all the way to oblivion, but you cannot change how anyone else sees the world"...nor can you enlighten a fool.
30 Hz has been the standard for viz sim for quite a while. Onyx IR has always built around how much realism it can put into that 30 FPS, not on making the frame rate faster.
The fact is, most games move through space at unrealistic speeds, and a higher frame rate helps. But most airline and military flight simulators are driven by SGI Onyx IR systems, running at 30 Hz.
Not to mention these little things called "glasses", apparently they use advanded algorithms to bend light, thus increasing vision, perhaps this should just get its own story.....
I understand why you think the flickering lights shouldn't matter, but in my experience, they do. Many times at my last job I was walking down the long hall into work and I could see the secretary's monitor flickering through the glass door in the hall (flourescent lights all around). Once I got about halfway down the hall, and through the door, the flickering stopped. I was still easily 40 feet from the monitor, so it's not the "1 foot" effect. The only thing I could come up with was the view through the glass door also included reflections from the flourescent lights. Somehow, the combination caused problems.
Do you know what 20/20 or 6/6 means? If not, read on. Simply put, 20/20 means that you are able to see on an eye chart at 20 feet that which a person with normal visual acuity can see. If you require glasses because your optometrist says you have 20/60 vision, that means you are able to discriminate characters on an eye chart at 20 feet that a person with normal acuity can see at a distance of 60 feet. Hence, this gentleman can only see the eyechart at 20 feet, while you would be able to see it at 120 feet. Sound normal to you? (bloody american...)
Above reference is made to normal visual acuity. What does that mean? The standard definition of normal visual acuity is the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc.
Consider a circle which contains 360 degrees. One degree contains 60 minutes. Therefore, a visual angle of one minute of arc is 1/60 of a degree. The visual angle subtended by a spatial patterned is easily measured
Now we have anonymous fools. My vision is 20/300 in my right eye, 20/400 in my left, and with glasses I see just fine. So quit this cry-baby shit about 20/120 vision being some kind of handicap.
On a side note, I think the tendency here in america is to measure vision in diopters.
The death of the zoom tool
by
HawaiianMayan
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
IBM brought one of these screens by Alias|Wavefront to show. The image detail is unbelievable.
In fact, you don't need a zoom tool on your paint program anymore,.. you just need a real magnifying glass sitting next to the monitor (IBM brought one), because it's showing much more detail than you can really see!
One thing it shows, though, is the need for vector-bases scalable interfaces... the default Windows UI was so tiny on that screen it was really hard to use!
Re:The death of the zoom tool
by
bhsx
·
· Score: 1
I believe that ROX Desktop http://rox.sf.net is vector-based, so would scale very well to this screen. It's quick as all-get-out and light to a point that it would be wise to use on a graphic-intensive ws; though I think this bad boy (DeepView) could handle just about any environment you through at it.
-- put the what in the where?
Re:The death of the zoom tool
by
zapfie
·
· Score: 2
That's actually something I've been thinking about.. the idea I finally came up with after brainstorming it a bit is that you would need two coordinate systems, one in pixels, and one in some other unit system of your choosing. You could then specify a button as 5 units by 1 unit, and set the screen to be 64 units by 48 units or something. This would allow you to a) change the size of the workspace independent of the screen resolution and b) change the screen resolution independant of the workspace size. Of course, you would probably need some safeguard to make sure you didn't have a workspace that was much larger than your current resolution could handle, which might result in unreadable text, etc... Back to your original point though, I definately second the notion it's high time for some vector-based interfaces.
Re:The death of the zoom tool
by
DavidRavenMoon
·
· Score: 2
One thing it shows, though, is the need for vector-bases scalable interfaces...
Like Mac OS X?;)
-- --
if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Re:The death of the zoom tool
by
HawaiianMayan
·
· Score: 1
Like Mac OS X?;)
Um, no. A huge percentage of OS X is drawn with fixed size bitmaps. Some things, if you're lucky, are drawn with very large bitmaps scaled down (so they could conceivably be made bigger), but most of it is fixed-size and small.
Amazingly, OS X is actually LESS scalable than Windows (at least prior to XP), which allows font scaling and draws the window glyphs with TrueType fonts.
When Aqua was first shown in public a few optimistic types believed the system was actually drawing those pretty buttons from scratch, and that therefore they could be scaled, but it's simply not the case.
(I wish Aqua really DID draw them... then you could change the color! Aqua's almost sick reliance on bitmaps is the major reason you can't choose a custom interface color (they actually store two sets of bitmaps for blue and graphite. Unbelievable!))
Re:The death of the zoom tool
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Of course Quartz offers a vector display model...
Hey mommy....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Can I have one of these? PLEASE I'll be a "good" boy. I promise! >=)
Quake III: Using the Chromium software, we can play Quake III Arena at a resolution of 3840x2400 pixels.
Where can I buy it and how much does it cost?
Really, it always amazes me what a laid back company IBM is.
--
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Re:Noone read to page 3 yet?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You can buy it online at IBM.com and it is ~$9000. That's just the monitor BTW, I have no idea how much the rest is.
Re:Noone read to page 3 yet?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
$8K from the IBM store.
Am I meant to be impressed?
by
SIGFPE
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I use dual 21" monitors with an nvidia geforce4 900. Can't remember the exact resolution but it's around 3600x1500. Just standard parts you can get from CompUSA.
-- --
SIGFPE
Where the source, Luke?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Where is the source, Luke? Where, Luke? For the love of God and all that is holy, where, Luke, where is the source?
Ummm and Sony have announced that IBM and Toshiba will be joining up to develop the architecture and processors for the Playstation 3.
The odds on these two pieces of work not being related have to be pretty slim. Its a pretty clear gameplan, XBOX2 is a "Windows Home Gateway", PS3 is a "Multimedia Home Gateway" that happens to be running linux.
-- An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard The odds on these two pieces of work not being related have to be pretty slim. Its a pretty clear gameplan, XBOX2 is a "Windows Home Gateway", PS3 is a "Multimedia Home Gateway" that happens to be running linux.
You have absolutely no proof to back up these claims. Do you know HOW much research IBM does? Here is a list of research products [ibm.com]. Thats about 400 different projects that IBM is currently working on. Given the amount of projects I'de say there is a greater probability that they're NOT related. Except that they both involve parallel processing.
-- A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
Which is why you use an LCD...
by
MosesJones
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Films are 24Hz, but you don't worry about that, and using an LCD screen means that you don't get the blurring and flashing of a normal monitor.
-- An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
wackybrit
·
· Score: 1
You're right, but I just had a brainwave..
Could you make a monitor that has multiple skewed electron beams so that you get a more LCD-like effect of the whole image appearing at once?
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
and how do you cram multiple electron guns into the already crammed to the top monitor case you dumbass ?
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
donglekey
·
· Score: 2
Actually film runs at 24 frames a second, and even though this is enough for the illusion of motion, persistence of vision does not stretch that far. Projectors in movie theatres open and shut twice every frame, so standard theatre film movies are shown at 48Hz
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Actually I hate teh 24 fps of film. Action shots REALLY REALLY SUCK. There's nop such thing as fluid movement.
They need to boost the frame rate to like 60+ fps at least when showing action sequences.
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
martyn+s
·
· Score: 1
Well the difference between film at 24Hz and video games at 24Hz is that film is motion blurred, so each frame captures everything from the start of the frame till the end of the frame (temporally). I remember reading about videocards to use motion blur to improve upon the monitors natural refresh rate. Even if the monitor is going at only 85Hz, using motion blur (combining multiple frames into one) should make games smoother.
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Crammed to the top? Take a look inside a monitor sometime, dumbass, there's a big area of air.
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
by
RegularFry
·
· Score: 1
Someone's already done this. I forget if it was Sony or Hitachi, but I remember seeing a proof-of-concept model of a 1280x1024 monitor made from several smaller units. The whole thing was about an inch thick. The CRTs used some high-somethingorother phosphor that only needed a couple of hundred volts between anode and cathode. This was about a year after TFTs hit the mainstream, I think, so it died a death. Nice idea, though.
... I know! Lets have a press release about our high resolution graphics products, and put a high resolution picture in with the article!
Oh, and while we're at it, lets make it a 256 color gif!
-- Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Re:56 Hz? (LCD)
by
qnonsense
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's an LCD. It's not like a monitor that flickers. The glow is fully solid, it's just to color of the pixels that refresh at 56Hz. That's plenty fast when the whole damn thing ain't flashing at you.
-- There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Not that kind of bandwith ....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Calculate the pixel frequency, and think analog.
Re:Not that kind of bandwith ....
by
vofka
·
· Score: 1
Why? (good) TFT Displays are not fed with a pure Analog Signal like CRT's are, they are fed with a pure-digital signal, which addresses each colour-pixel individually, and sequentially. Surely the Analog Mindset does not apply Here!
-- Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Re:Not that kind of bandwith ....
by
jaymz168
·
· Score: 0
And if you look at the picture there are four(?) DVI connectors running out of the SGE rack
One thing puzzles me about the images that were shown from popular games (Flight Simulator, Quake III, etc.): Why did the graphics look so fuzzy at that ultra-high resolution? The site mentioned that texture-mapping on Quake III isn't optimized for that resolution, but my question is:
Is the point that it runs in real time at that resolution (even though it looks mediocre) or is the point that it supposedly looks great at that resolution? If it's about real-time high-res, then that makes sense to me, but practically speaking who cares what the resolution is if the image quality doesn't improve with higher resolution as seems to be the case with Quake III and Flight Simulator.
um, you can't expect the actual textures to look better just because they are shown with better resolution (in fact, quite the opposite). the "point" is that you can run it in real time with that resolution, and make software that has high enough resolution textures and looks really good. It's kinda like bumping your monitor resolution to 1600x1200 and expecting old DOS games to look better as the result.
Man you're right those q3a graphics suck. Why would they even bring it up? It looks horrid my Geforce 2 Ultra blows the shit outa that YUKKY maybe with games like Doom 3 it'll look good but q3a is just to old for something like that, yuk.
Re:hmmm
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Mod parent up - Score:5 Informative
Announced
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
This monitor was announced back in 1998 or in 1999. It is GOOD[tm] to see they have a product by now, even if a year or two behind schedule!
Congrats IBM!!!
The original poster is not a troll, here's why.
by
wackybrit
·
· Score: 2
He has a point. A dual headed GeForce 4 can drive two displays at 1600x1200 without problem, which comes out to 3200x1200. Okay, that's not quite 3600x2400, but we're not talking miles off. Why does it require 8 Linux machines just to rustle up the power to display images on a screen of that resolution?
I could understand if the Linux boxes were running a powerful simulation or something, but surely we can get devices of that resolution running on a single PC with some pretty intense hardware.
Or, is GeForce 4 et al really on the cutting edge? What do the people with millions of dollars use? Do they have to start using multiple machines like IBM? Sounds unlikely to me. What about the military? Surely someone is one step ahead of the latest consumer technology?
The site design & choice of image formats (gif) aren't all that appealing.
The vidoes could use better lighting, but its still nice to see what the thing is capable of.
Intel again? Why not Power4?
by
axxackall
·
· Score: 1
What's happened to IBM's Power4? I believed it would be much better for such kind of tasks? Or Power4 is dead?
--
Less is more !
Re:Intel again? Why not Power4?
by
rusty0101
·
· Score: 2
I would venture to guess because the Power4 processor is not optimized, nor designed to be used in a workstation environment. I would also suspect that it is not designed to be used as a graphics processor.
Power chips are not PowerPC chips. If you are refering to PowerPC Generation 4 processors, your message is a missleading question. Additionally, I don't believe that the PPCg4 is quite up to an x86 processor (off the shelf speeds) yet. Don't get me wrong, for the work I do, a G4 Mac would probably be sufficient, but if you are talking raw graphics processing, that's a different market.
-Rusty
-- You never know...
But it's not going to become a big seller.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I agree with the people who are unimpressed. I can get 1600X1200 with my old 32meg card but the problem is that the 17" display isn't useable at that level of detail. We need fatter displays not higher pixel counts.
The HawaiianMayan said he saw the thing and it needed a magnifying glass to be useful. That's kinda silly. There doesn't seem to be a shortage of high res graphics output, it's the display tech that sucks and a 22' LCD for nine grand doesn't sound like a big step anywhere in particular.
Apparently 6G LCD manufacturing includes options for both 19 inch and 30inch substates. Now 30 inch LCD is a big enough change to revive the PC market and might make these kinds of resolutions actually worthwhile, but we're probably years away from reasonable prices on those kinds of toys which does not bode well for the next few because anything less than that is simply not imprsessive compared to what's already been commoditized.
I agree with this post. Life is way over rated, & girlfriends are a lot of fucking trouble.
-- Special people have long socks, ride short buses, & invent witty sigs.
T221 only $8400!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I can't believe that the display costs only $8400!
Just wish that NVidia will make a card capable of running that resolution. Then, add Doom 3... instant heaven.
Re:The death of the zoom tool-Focus please
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Hmmm...I remember the early years of graphics processing. Multi-racks of equipment taller than you Kodak had something that looked similiar, used for satellite image processing. IBM's set-up looks reminesent of the same.
Chromium, the software that makes it all possible
by
thatguymike
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Chromium is a project at Stanford. There was a paper published at this years SIGGRAPH which discusses how the T221 is driven by a cluster and the SGE, as well as other applications including a parallel volume renderer. (http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cr/)
Chromium is an open source project and you can get it from http://chromium.sourceforge.net. Chromium is designed to enable people to harness the power of a "graphics cluster" and/or use multiple displays. You don't have to buy a T221 and an SGE to render Quake at high resolution, you can use multiple monitors/projectors instead.
-Mike
There are already many packages that allow for distributed rendering across a network. One of them is chromium (a spin-off of WireGL), which according to some can run Quake in a VR cave (3 walls, stereo).
Like the first post said, this isn't new.
-- -S
The Display
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
From scouring IBM's website I noticed that they bundle this monitor together with a Matrox G200MMS card, which is a multimonitor card, capable of outputting to 4 monitors at the same time. This should mean that the monitor has 4 inputs and can display 4 images on a single screen, each at 1920x1200 resolution.
Now just think of the possibilities if you could put 4 units of Geforce Ti4600 into one computer. That would be some serious 3D power. Unfortunately this will probably never be realized, however it will take most probably still take a long time before any gaming card will be able to run 3840x2400 >20 fps, which would be the bare minimum for playing.
And on a monitor of this scale and cost, it had better be over 60 fps!
Also it raises the interesting idea of using this monitor as a combo monitor for 4 separate PCs. That could add up to some interesting computing.
Since Chromium allows applications to demonstrate pretty much linear scalability as nodes are added, I would guess that they got interactive frame rates. At least, that's what I've seen with Chromium displaying to one of those displays at Stanford.
SGI did this two years ago, as a *product*
by
green+pizza
·
· Score: 2
SGI did the graphics cluster thing over two years ago and even released it as a product. Very, very similar to the IBM. They even ported several of their programming APIs and SDKs from InfiniteReality to the Linux Graphics Cluster. Not many were sold, however. Heck, Slashdot didn't even cover it. It was still pretty neat to see multiple spanned monitors and even composited high res projectors driven by a half rack of Linux PCs. Many of the demos were actually ported from SGI's big iron Onyx machines and worked just as well on the cluster. The basic setup was a stack of rackmount Linux boxes using nVidia AGP cards and custom PCI cards daisy chained together to provide sync for glSwapBuffers among other things. Also availble were gigE and Myrinet for networking the machines with something better than 100BT. A compositor (similar to what's used in InfinitePerformance) was also available.
NCSA has been making good progress on developing this. The million bucks of SGI hardware has of course been replaced by a rack of Linux PC's. Instructions are actually on line. It's not trivial to build, though. And using LCD projecters does have real downsides. If you buy a dozen identical projectors, they won't have the same brightness and color saturation. Actually, they aren't even consistent from edge to edge. So your display isn't perfect, and you can definitly see the tile edges. Not to mention the fun of building a usable support structure which lets you get all the alignments right. If you don't need it to take up an entire wall, I think the IBM T221 display is a cheaper way to get super high-res output. But of course your high-res Quake won't be lifesize either.:-)
IA-64 Itanium perhaps? However, looking at Intel's specs I don't see 866 listed as an available clock speed. They list the original Itanium at 733 and 800 MHz, and Itanium 2 at 900 MHz and 1 GHz.
I would have thought that IBM would plug their own hardware whenever possible -- the T221 display is certainly phenomenal, and they provide a link so you could buy one of those... It has me wondering how I can come up with $8400 to get one. (Heck, when those things came out, they were $20,000! Ah, progress.)
So, this leaves us to wonder... no mention of processors, "low" clock speed -- compared to what we're used to seeing -- something new from AMD? IBM pissed off at Intel? Some new massively parallel top secret silicon from IBM?
Watch... it'll turn out to be Pentium IIIs -- they call 'em "workstations," so they might have recovered them from some other project. (Or all the engineers got new workstations and wondered what cool project they could do with their old ones... Q3A at 3840x2400? What the heck!) What's the limiting factor in this case, processor power or network bandwidth?
--
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Nice but not new
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Hmmmm... where have I seen this before? Oh yeah: http://www.sgi.com/realitycenter/walls.html.
Plus you get 48-bit color, stereo viewing, and one unix system to manage not n linux-pcs, and more. Pretty much all the stuff they covered was happening on Onyx2 systems 5 years ago.
And doesn't Fermi lab have a large wall with a much higher resolution for ananlysing particle accelerator data (I vaguely remember it being on a cover of Wired magazine).
I have seen it at TJ Watson, connected to an SP3 through the switch of the SP. It's really nice. You can read 2 A4 pages of PDF side-by-side, and it's gorgeous.
To program also it's usefull, you can open plenty of Emacs, but you have to get big fonts, otherwise it's unreadable.
One problem, when connected to a single PC, is the
graphics card. I have seen it with a single quad-output PCI matrox card. The card can't keep up.
You really need a cluster to drive the 4-dual DVI inputs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not an OS solution. Linux is peripheral to the whole article.
I have been pwned because my
SGI had finally lost it's place at every table.
An article about the methods IBM used to cluster eight dual processor Linux workstations to provide the necessary graphics power.
Movies of Deep View in action.
9.2 megaPixel, up to 56 Hz refresh in a 22 inch LCD screen. Want!
This is now very high on my luxury wish list. When is the next IT bubble scheduled to happen again? I have to start my plan to get rich on other people's stupidity and greed so I can afford a system like this.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Quoth the article:
since no single graphics adapter has the necessary horsepower and bandwidth to feed a 9.2 million pixel display (at 41Hz using 24 bits per pixel)
Hmm, doing the math:
3840*2400 pixels = 9216000 Pixels per Frame
9216000*3 (3=24/8) = 27648000 Bytes per Frame
27648000*8 = 221184000 Bits Per Frame
221184000 (bpf) * 41 (fps) = 9068544000 Bits per Second
9068544000/1024 = 8856000 KiloBits per Second (approx)
8856000/1024 = 8648 MegaBits per Second (approx)
8648/1024 = Just over 8 GigaBits per Second
Now, with newer DX9-type graphics Adapters, and AGP 8x, we can do about 2.5 to 3 Gigabits per second just now (over the AGP Bus, haven't calculated Actual Display bitrates!)... Applying Moore's law, (theorum, whatever!), we can safely say that this kind of horsepower will be common in a single, average, desktop PC inside of two to three years.
Sure, this may be a boost to Hollywood today - but soon enough, it will be pretty commonplace technology. (Though I'm betting the most expensive item in that bunch of kit is the actual LCD Display, not the kit driving it!).
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
SawMill is an IBM project to build an operating system around the L4 microkernel (-kernel). The project web site is short on details of how the project is going so I was wondering if anyone else is keeping tabs on it?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
This used to be almost exclusively SGI's territory.
/. poll on your favourite law?
- Hooke's
A few years ago I attended a presentation at NCSA where Larry Smarr was talking about their plans for a similar display, driven by about $1M of SGI boxes. I think they wanted to call it "The Great Wall of Power".
Some future PlayStation "n" will do this in your living room.
Isn't Moore's Law great?
Which leads me to ask, have we ever had a
-Moore's
-Murphy's
-Amdahl's
-Newton's
-Boyle's
-whatever?
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Deep Thought coming?
Why not just turn your monitor on and off as fast as you can? You'll save a lot of money.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
From the system hardware page
Gigabit Ethernet, for transfer of the rendered pixels to the display.
Thats just badass.
It states Click to see the full resolution image (1086x1058) but the full resolution image (407 kilos) was already loaded to show you a thumbnail. Funny to see this bad web-design on IBM's page about new graphic system (kind of marketing?). Or people just forgot why it's polite to use thumbnails in the Net?
41 hz ... ouch! That thing must look like a strobe light.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
IBM brought one of these screens by Alias|Wavefront to show. The image detail is unbelievable.
In fact, you don't need a zoom tool on your paint program anymore,.. you just need a real magnifying glass sitting next to the monitor (IBM brought one), because it's showing much more detail than you can really see!
One thing it shows, though, is the need for vector-bases scalable interfaces... the default Windows UI was so tiny on that screen it was really hard to use!
Can I have one of these? PLEASE I'll be a "good" boy. I promise! >=)
Quake III: Using the Chromium software, we can play Quake III Arena at a resolution of 3840x2400 pixels.
Where can I buy it and how much does it cost?
Really, it always amazes me what a laid back company IBM is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I use dual 21" monitors with an nvidia geforce4 900. Can't remember the exact resolution but it's around 3600x1500. Just standard parts you can get from CompUSA.
-- SIGFPE
Where is the source, Luke? Where, Luke? For the love of God and all that is holy, where, Luke, where is the source?
Ummm and Sony have announced that IBM and Toshiba will be joining up to develop the architecture and processors for the Playstation 3.
The odds on these two pieces of work not being related have to be pretty slim. Its a pretty clear gameplan, XBOX2 is a "Windows Home Gateway", PS3 is a "Multimedia Home Gateway" that happens to be running linux.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Films are 24Hz, but you don't worry about that, and using an LCD screen means that you don't get the blurring and flashing of a normal monitor.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
... I know! Lets have a press release about our high resolution graphics products, and put a high resolution picture in with the article!
Oh, and while we're at it, lets make it a 256 color gif!
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
It's an LCD. It's not like a monitor that flickers. The glow is fully solid, it's just to color of the pixels that refresh at 56Hz. That's plenty fast when the whole damn thing ain't flashing at you.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Calculate the pixel frequency, and think analog.
Yeah, but at what frame rate?
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
as i said. who cares.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
One thing puzzles me about the images that were shown from popular games (Flight Simulator, Quake III, etc.): Why did the graphics look so fuzzy at that ultra-high resolution? The site mentioned that texture-mapping on Quake III isn't optimized for that resolution, but my question is:
Is the point that it runs in real time at that resolution (even though it looks mediocre) or is the point that it supposedly looks great at that resolution? If it's about real-time high-res, then that makes sense to me, but practically speaking who cares what the resolution is if the image quality doesn't improve with higher resolution as seems to be the case with Quake III and Flight Simulator.
Amazing magic tricks
This monitor was announced back in 1998 or in 1999. It is GOOD[tm] to see they have a product by now, even if a year or two behind schedule!
Congrats IBM!!!
He has a point. A dual headed GeForce 4 can drive two displays at 1600x1200 without problem, which comes out to 3200x1200. Okay, that's not quite 3600x2400, but we're not talking miles off. Why does it require 8 Linux machines just to rustle up the power to display images on a screen of that resolution?
I could understand if the Linux boxes were running a powerful simulation or something, but surely we can get devices of that resolution running on a single PC with some pretty intense hardware.
Or, is GeForce 4 et al really on the cutting edge? What do the people with millions of dollars use? Do they have to start using multiple machines like IBM? Sounds unlikely to me. What about the military? Surely someone is one step ahead of the latest consumer technology?
mogorific carpentry experiments
Take one of thease
Add a little, traveling a sales man
and a few neurons
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
For such a nice setup, the presentation is dull!
The site design & choice of image formats (gif) aren't all that appealing.
The vidoes could use better lighting, but its still nice to see what the thing is capable of.
What's happened to IBM's Power4? I believed it would be much better for such kind of tasks? Or Power4 is dead?
Less is more !
I agree with the people who are unimpressed. I can get 1600X1200 with my old 32meg card but the problem is that the 17" display isn't useable at that level of detail. We need fatter displays not higher pixel counts.
The HawaiianMayan said he saw the thing and it needed a magnifying glass to be useful. That's kinda silly. There doesn't seem to be a shortage of high res graphics output, it's the display tech that sucks and a 22' LCD for nine grand doesn't sound like a big step anywhere in particular.
Apparently 6G LCD manufacturing includes options for both 19 inch and 30inch substates. Now 30 inch LCD is a big enough change to revive the PC market and might make these kinds of resolutions actually worthwhile, but we're probably years away from reasonable prices on those kinds of toys which does not bode well for the next few because anything less than that is simply not imprsessive compared to what's already been commoditized.
sigh... what a man go through to get high quality Pr0n.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Call me when you have your two 21" monitors set up side by side with NO break between them.
You're not supposed to talk at all. You are expected to praise Lunix and kiss Taco's sorry ass.
-- MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Nvidia (amonst others) has kick-ass drivers that let you see all sorts of groovy stuff in real 3D (games, movies, pictures).
I am not a cyclops.
Get a girlfriend, and while your at it, how about a life too.
I can't believe that the display costs only $8400!
... instant heaven.
Just wish that NVidia will make a card capable of running that resolution. Then, add Doom 3
Hmmm...I remember the early years of graphics processing. Multi-racks of equipment taller than you
Kodak had something that looked similiar, used for satellite image processing. IBM's set-up looks reminesent of the same.
Chromium is a project at Stanford. There was a paper published at this years SIGGRAPH which discusses how the T221 is driven by a cluster and the SGE, as well as other applications including a parallel volume renderer. (http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cr/) Chromium is an open source project and you can get it from http://chromium.sourceforge.net. Chromium is designed to enable people to harness the power of a "graphics cluster" and/or use multiple displays. You don't have to buy a T221 and an SGE to render Quake at high resolution, you can use multiple monitors/projectors instead. -Mike
There are already many packages that allow for distributed rendering across a network. One of them is chromium (a spin-off of WireGL), which according to some can run Quake in a VR cave (3 walls, stereo).
Like the first post said, this isn't new.
-S
From scouring IBM's website I noticed that they bundle this monitor together with a Matrox G200MMS card, which is a multimonitor card, capable of outputting to 4 monitors at the same time. This should mean that the monitor has 4 inputs and can display 4 images on a single screen, each at 1920x1200 resolution.
Now just think of the possibilities if you could put 4 units of Geforce Ti4600 into one computer. That would be some serious 3D power. Unfortunately this will probably never be realized, however it will take most probably still take a long time before any gaming card will be able to run 3840x2400 >20 fps, which would be the bare minimum for playing.
And on a monitor of this scale and cost, it had better be over 60 fps!
Also it raises the interesting idea of using this monitor as a combo monitor for 4 separate PCs. That could add up to some interesting computing.
Since Chromium allows applications to demonstrate pretty much linear scalability as nodes are added, I would guess that they got interactive frame rates. At least, that's what I've seen with Chromium displaying to one of those displays at Stanford.
SGI did the graphics cluster thing over two years ago and even released it as a product. Very, very similar to the IBM. They even ported several of their programming APIs and SDKs from InfiniteReality to the Linux Graphics Cluster. Not many were sold, however. Heck, Slashdot didn't even cover it. It was still pretty neat to see multiple spanned monitors and even composited high res projectors driven by a half rack of Linux PCs. Many of the demos were actually ported from SGI's big iron Onyx machines and worked just as well on the cluster. The basic setup was a stack of rackmount Linux boxes using nVidia AGP cards and custom PCI cards daisy chained together to provide sync for glSwapBuffers among other things. Also availble were gigE and Myrinet for networking the machines with something better than 100BT. A compositor (similar to what's used in InfinitePerformance) was also available.
m l
.edu and .org have also rolled their own graphic clusters... though I don't know who supplied the compositors.
More information (white paper and data sheet) can be found on SGI's legacy systems page:
http://www.sgi.com/products/legacy/vis_systems.ht
I belive a few
Way to go IBM! Now let's see you put it to a good use... say...
.edu would build this excellent... um, tool!
CAVE Quake!!
: )
Now if only my
Imagine a beo..
i mean, imagine single node workstations of these.
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
When will this hit retail soa I can buy one and play EverCrack on it?
NCSA has been making good progress on developing this. The million bucks of SGI hardware has of course been replaced by a rack of Linux PC's. Instructions are actually on line. It's not trivial to build, though. And using LCD projecters does have real downsides. If you buy a dozen identical projectors, they won't have the same brightness and color saturation. Actually, they aren't even consistent from edge to edge. So your display isn't perfect, and you can definitly see the tile edges. Not to mention the fun of building a usable support structure which lets you get all the alignments right. If you don't need it to take up an entire wall, I think the IBM T221 display is a cheaper way to get super high-res output. But of course your high-res Quake won't be lifesize either. :-)
IA-64 Itanium perhaps? However, looking at Intel's specs I don't see 866 listed as an available clock speed. They list the original Itanium at 733 and 800 MHz, and Itanium 2 at 900 MHz and 1 GHz.
I would have thought that IBM would plug their own hardware whenever possible -- the T221 display is certainly phenomenal, and they provide a link so you could buy one of those... It has me wondering how I can come up with $8400 to get one. (Heck, when those things came out, they were $20,000! Ah, progress.)
So, this leaves us to wonder... no mention of processors, "low" clock speed -- compared to what we're used to seeing -- something new from AMD? IBM pissed off at Intel? Some new massively parallel top secret silicon from IBM?
Watch... it'll turn out to be Pentium IIIs -- they call 'em "workstations," so they might have recovered them from some other project. (Or all the engineers got new workstations and wondered what cool project they could do with their old ones... Q3A at 3840x2400? What the heck!) What's the limiting factor in this case, processor power or network bandwidth?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Hmmmm ... where have I seen this before? Oh yeah: http://www.sgi.com/realitycenter/walls.html.
Plus you get 48-bit color, stereo viewing, and one unix system to manage not n linux-pcs, and more. Pretty much all the stuff they covered was happening on Onyx2 systems 5 years ago.
And doesn't Fermi lab have a large wall with a much higher resolution for ananlysing particle accelerator data (I vaguely remember it being on a cover of Wired magazine).
3200x1200 = 3 840 000
3600x2400 = 8 640 000
Which is 2.5 times more. So you didn't really mean to make that casual remark did you?
I have seen it at TJ Watson, connected to an SP3 through the switch of the SP. It's really nice. You can read 2 A4 pages of PDF side-by-side, and it's gorgeous. To program also it's usefull, you can open plenty of Emacs, but you have to get big fonts, otherwise it's unreadable. One problem, when connected to a single PC, is the graphics card. I have seen it with a single quad-output PCI matrox card. The card can't keep up. You really need a cluster to drive the 4-dual DVI inputs.
A beowulf cluster of those.
Special people have long socks, ride short buses, & invent witty sigs.
how do you enable the alll fuh buffah???
indeed