8K? That’s cute. This display has 600 million pixels
- Reference: 1674541810
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/01/24/46k_display_tacc/
- Source link:
The massive display [1]claims a resolution of 46,080 x 12,960 pixels. Put another way, that works out to just shy of 600 megapixels, or in TV marketing speak 46K.
However, this isn't some stadium Jumbotron or theater projection. As you might expect, Stallion isn't one panel, but instead a collection of 18 Samsung 8K QLED TV, with each 65-inch screen arranged in a 6x3 grid measuring roughly 28-feet wide by 8-feet tall.
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The upgraded Stallion data visualization system ... Click to enlarge
The purpose of Stallion, based at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), is the visualization of large scientific datasets. In a recent [3]write-up Jo Wozniak, a visualization specialist working on Stallion, explained that the higher resolution and greater brightness will allow boffins to pick out details that otherwise would have been missed without the larger scale.
For instance, one of the first applications of the updated array was by the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), which used Stallion to visualize data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope. Another application is for high-resolution rendering of models.
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"Stallion is ideal for showcasing Virtual Angkor, our fully realized creation of the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor around 1300 CE," UT Austin History Professor Adam Clulow [5]explained .
[6]LUMI supercomputer puts GPU partition through its paces with hardcore science
[7]Years late and 36 cores short of AMD, who are Intel's 4th-gen Xeons even for?
[8]Uncle Sam needs novel memory for nuke sims. So why did it choose Intel?
[9]NOAA, Microsoft partner to put climate models in the clouds
According to Paul Navrátil, TACC's director of strategic technologies, the decision to use 8K panels was essentially a future-proofing measure. The upgrades come "at the beginning of a technology curve in 8K televisions, which will allow us to maintain a solid technological basis."
It probably doesn't hurt that 8K TVs have gotten considerably less expensive in recent years. A quick search of BestBuy reveals models as low as $1,299, though it's not clear which model of Samsung television TACC is using in Stallion.
[10]
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In some ways the latest iteration of Stallion is actually less complicated than in the past. The first generation of the array used 80, 30-inch monitors in a 16 wide by five wide configuration. But despite using more monitors, it offered less resolution — 328 megapixels versus 597 — and was hardwired in such a way that meant it could only be used as a single monolithic display.
By comparison, the updated array is divided into six individually addressable columns, three monitors tall. These can be combined into a single large panel, or broken out into smaller clusters, allowing for multiple data sources to be displayed simultaneously.
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While the 18 high-res displays may be the star of the show, running data visualizations at these resolutions requires a considerable amount of computational horsepower.
Stallion is powered by a cluster of 36, hexacore Sandy Bridge CPUs each with a matching Nvidia Quadro K5000 GPU for a total 232 processor cores, 19TB of disk storage, 1.28TB of memory, and 74 gigabytes of GPU memory.
Visualized data rendered by the cluster are then distributed across the displays using software developed by TACC's visualization team called DisplayCluster and MostPixelsEver: Cluster Edition. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/vislab/stallion
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/01/23/tacc_stallion_46k.jpg
[3] https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/new-year-new-stallion
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y8@6UND6s08-J3y6GuD2vQAAAI8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/new-year-new-stallion
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/19/lumi_supercomputer_gpu_pilot_phase/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/intel_sapphire_rapids/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/intel_doe_nukes_mem/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/01/noaa_microsoft_cloud_weather/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y8@6UND6s08-J3y6GuD2vQAAAI8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y8@6UND6s08-J3y6GuD2vQAAAI8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y8@6UND6s08-J3y6GuD2vQAAAI8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Holy Bezels, Batman
Agreed. I'm not impressed by those thick black lines dividing panels.
Re: Holy Bezels, Batman
If you zoom in it appears they aren't actually bezels, but gaps between the screens. The bezels themselves are quite narrow.
Re: Holy Bezels, Batman
"I rather suspect they rolled their own controllers, too..."
I think this is implied in the article, as they say it is configurable to act as one whole screen or 6 3-screen 'columns' (which AFAIK is not available 'out-of-the-box)
Re: Holy Bezels, Batman
Those bezels are massive
That could be a song.
Re: Holy Bezels, Batman
> Those bezels are massive, and highly distracting.
I doubt the bezels would be as distracting in real life as the low res photograph has lead you to suspect. Comparing it to a few 1080 monitors on a desk is likely misleading.
The folk who put this together made this design decision based on their real experience of using its previous version to visualise data.
Samsung 8k TVs
Are they all smart TVs, cheerfully phoning home to the mothership?
Re: Samsung 8k TVs
If they don't connect them to the internet they aren't phoning home anywhere. Smart TVs don't seem to complain about lack of connectivity when you are using them only via the HDMI inputs.
Re: Samsung 8k TVs
"If they don't connect them to the internet they aren't phoning home anywhere. Smart TVs don't seem to complain about lack of connectivity when you are using them only via the HDMI inputs."
For now, I suspect consumer TVs wills start to mandate internet connectivity for 'security' reasons eventually even for being used as dumb monitors.
1200 person people mover
Me and 299 other cars/SUVs come together each morning to create a tiled people mover. Many of the peo-pixles are blank but that's not the point.
Re: 1200 person people mover
Most of them being blank is just the state of the modern world I'm afraid. Get used to it.
It's the occasional dead peo-pixle that would concern me more!
Re: 1200 person people mover
Not all blank pixels are without consequence:
https://youtu.be/EbFLGi4KhHo
Re: 1200 person people mover
> Me and 299 other cars/SUVs come together each morning to create a tiled people mover
That would be a fair comparison if those 300 vehicles were centrally controlled, as opposed to each responding locally to each other.
Still, even Randall Munroe choose to overlook this recently:
https://m.xkcd.com/2684/
(The pedestrians are shown a safe distance from one another, the cars are not. This however is moot given the other panels on the cartoon!)
There's good reason car analogies are mistrusted by many of us here.
Oops
I really do not want to pay that electricity bill.
However, ...
Hello professor Falken, would you like to play a game of chess?
Holy Bezels, Batman
You'd think they'd use panels with a smaller bezel. Those bezels are massive, and highly distracting.
Zero bezel modular displays are off the shelf items in entertainment. You can easily get modular ones designed to go nearly infinite in size, built up in a day then taken down and put it up somewhere else a couple of days later.
Colour calibrated, too.
I rather suspect they rolled their own controllers, too, instead of buying the off the shelf units like Tessera.