If you think 8K is a pretty high resolution, a supercomputer lab’s new Stallion tiled display system might distract you from that idea.
This huge screen is claimed to have a resolution of 46,080 x 12,960 pixels. That’s 600 megapixels, or 46K in TV marketing language.
As you can imagine, Stallion is not actually a single panel, but a system of 18 Samsung 8K QLED TVs. Each of the 65-inch screens is arranged in a 6×3 grid.
Located at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Stallion’s goal is to visualize large scientific datasets. Jo Wozniak, a visualization expert working on Stallion, explains in a recent post that higher resolution and greater brightness will allow experts to select details that might be overlooked without the larger scale.
For example, one of the first applications of the updated series was by the Early Broadcast Science Research for Cosmic Evolution (CEERS), which used Stallion to visualize data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope. Another application emerged by processing models with high resolution.
“The Stallion is ideal for showcasing Virtual Angkor, the fully realized creation of Angkor, the Cambodian metropolis around 1300 AD,” said UT Austin Professor of History Adam Clulow, while TACC’s director of strategic technologies, Paul Navrátil, said the decision to use 8K panels is essentially future-proof. He says it’s a precaution.
Stallion is powered by a cluster of 36, hexacore Sandy Bridge CPUs, each with a matching Nvidia Quadro K5000 GPU for a total of 232 processor cores, 19 TB of disk storage, 1.28 TB of memory and 74 gigabytes of GPU memory. The data visualized by the cluster is then distributed to the screens using software called DisplayCluster and MostPixelsEver developed by TACC’s visualization team.
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