MiniMe
The MiniMe wall on display at the Supercomputing Conference, October 2006.
About
The system, named Mobile INteractive Imaging Multidisplay
Environment (MiniMe), consists of 15 24" panels arranged in a 5 wide
and 3 tall grid. A Mac Mini is mounted behind each panel to provide
a 1920x1200 video signal to each panel. The cumulative resolution of
the display wall is nearly 30 million pixels. The system is designed to
collapse and fit inside a shipping case. This allows Scripps researchers
to carry the MiniMe system to meetings and conferences. For example, at
the California & World Oceans conference in Long Beach (Sep 17-20 2006),
researchers working on the SCCOOS and
CENCOOS projects presented their
research on the MiniMe at the exhibition.
Read More...
Hardware Specifications
Current Projects
Image Gallery
Collaborators
Acknowledgments
For information regarding events and availability, view the Minime calendar.
Hardware Specifications
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Fifteen-Node Intel-based Mac Mini Cluster
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Mac Pro Master Node
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Fifteen Dell UltraSharp LCD Displays
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Projects
Scalable
Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)
SAGE is a graphics streaming architecture for
supporting collaborative scientific visualization
environments with potentially hundreds of megapixels
of contiguous display resolution. SAGE is developed
by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the
University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the
OptIPuter project.
In collaborative scientific visualization, it is crucial to share high-resolution imagery as well as high-definition video among groups of collaborators at local or remote sites. The network-centered architecture of SAGE allows collaborators to simultaneously run various applications (such as 3D rendering, remote desktop, video streams and 2D maps) on local or remote clusters, and share them by streaming the pixels of each application over ultra-high-speed networks to large tiled displays. SAGE's streaming architecture is designed so that the output of arbitrary M by N pixel rendering cluster nodes can be streamed to X by Y pixel display screens, allowing user-definable layouts on the display. The dynamic pixel routing capability of SAGE lets users freely move and resize each application's imagery over tiled displays in run-time, tightly synchronizing the multiple visualization streams to form a single stream.
Applescripts for the iCluster
We
also use Applescripts and UNIX shell scripts
to launch applications on each display to set
up a ‘Dashboard’ like environment
that shows multiple webpages, movies and scene
files.
Synergy and Apple Remote Desktop
Synergy can be used to share a single mouse and
keyboard on the iCluster. Apple Remote Desktop
is another product that can let you control individual
machines and displays.
Magic Carpet
Magic Carpet is developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The program itself handles high-resolution graphics viewing across tiled displays by building "levels" at different resolutions and allowing each node to access and present the data accordingly.
Gallery
See more of the MiniMe here.
See the MiniMe in action at SuperComputing '06 in Florida here.
Additional photos coming soon!
Collaborators
- Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
- Center for Earth Observations and Applications
- Calit2 Center of GRAVITY, UC Irvine
- Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois
Industrial Partners and Affiliates
Acknowledgment
The MiniMe was designed by SIO VizCenter staff and students and funded by the CEOA to support high resolution display of scientific datasets at meetings and conferences. We are grateful to Greg Dawe, Calit2 for the construction of the MiniMe.
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