A 50 megapixel display wall is under construction at the Cecil H. & Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) for the display of multiple interactive 3D visualizations of various geophysical datasets. This system is designed through collaboration between major NSF funded projects such as OptIPuter and USArray (Earthscope), and will allow researchers to visually analyze data and present results at extremely high resolution.

The OptIPuter project leverages the capabilities of dedicated optical networks that interconnect instruments, processors, computer storage and visualization resources to aid in Earth Sciences research. This system comprises a cluster of seven Apple Power Mac G5 machines and twelve Apple 30” LCD screens (of maximum resolution 2560 x1600 each) tiled to form a 4x3 array and will be the first Apple-driven tiled display to our knowledge.

The Antelope software will be used for seismic data monitoring and archiving along with web-based analytical tools developed at the Array Network Facility (ANF) at IGPP.

OptIPuter software (developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory) such as JuxtaView (an image viewer for interacting with remotely located extremely high resolution 2D images) and Vol-a-Tile (interactive volume rendering software allowing navigation into gigabyte-sized seismic volumes) will also be used.

Interactive visualizations created by scientists at IGPP that overlay heterogeneous datasets such as seismic profiles, geology strata, earthquake locations, bathymetry and high resolution satellite imagery and aerial photos, using the Fledermaus software will also be viewed.

The configuration of each cluster node is: dual CPU 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB disk space, NVIDIA Ultra 6800 GeForce card, and the nodes are interconnected over gigabit Ethernet.

This system will also be part of the OptIPuter infrastructure, with fiber connections to the OptIPuter CAVEwave on the National Lambda Rail. The design of the system is based on the Geowall-2 class of displays and the OptIPuter Visualization Cluster at Scripps.

Nayak, A., Vernon, F., Kent, G., Orcutt, J., Kilb, D., Newman, R., Smarr, L., DeFanti, T., Leigh, J., Renambot, L., Johnson, A., High resolution visualization of USArray data on a 50 megapixel display using OptIPuter technologies, Eos Trans. AGU, 85(47), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract SF13A-0702, San Francisco, California, December 13th, 2004.