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. Here, a Nasa analyst is examining a colourised image of part of the centre of our galaxy. The blue specks are Milky Way stars, and the bluish-white haze in the background is light from older star clusters. In the top left of the picture (the third screen along) you can see the Black Widow Nebula, ten thousand light years away.
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.
Post By: Deepak Punjabi
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