Official HIPerWall Research page
The HIPerWall is a 200 Megapixel tiled display built to visualize enormous data sets. It allows viewers to see detail, with 100 dots per inch on the screens, while retaining the context of an overview by seeing surrounding data (also in high detail). This allows a group of scientists to collaborate, share detailed information, while still keeping the big picture.
Because the resolution of HIPerWall is so high (25600×8000 pixels), generating images and data sets for HIPerWall is quite a challenge. Conventional tools, like PhotoShop, can open such large images on machines with a lot of memory, but it takes a long time and interactivity is impossible. HIPerWall uses software to coordinate each of the tiles so it shows the proper part of an image or data set at the appropriate zoom and gives the appearance that many display tiles act in unison. Ongoing research into how to deliver data to the nodes in a timely manner will allow rapid dissemination of enormous data sets for use on HIPerWall.
Falko Kuester is Principal Investigator of the HIPerWall project. I was a Co-PI and took over as lead UCI faculty member when Falko left, working on methods of moving data within HIPerWall and to HIPerWall from remote clusters and data repositories. In addition, I have generated some of the imagery for HIPerWall in order to understand the limitations of conventional sequential image manipulation approaches and to determine where cluster computing could aid large-scale image manipulation.
The HIPerWall research web page has a number of pictures of the system in various stages of construction. Below are more pictures that show some of our early images and most of the team members that built the wall and software that drives it (click the images for a larger version). I took most of the pictures below (except for the one with Chancellor Drake and me).
Dr. Sung-Jin Kim, the author of the original HIPerWall software (TileViewer), and I formed a company along with Jeff Greenberg. Hiperwall Inc. licenses the technology from UCI and sells display wall software around the world. We have significantly enhanced the software capabilities and ease-of-use far beyond the old research version, adding the ability to show nearly any computer content on the wall, even proprietary applications while using minimal network bandwidth, as well as many other abilities, described here.
Larry Smarr at initial HIPerWall demo
