Unveiling a Somewhat Real Holodeck

Stony Brook University unveiled its latest engineering feat, a 1.5 billion pixel Reality Deck, at a demonstration held at the University's Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) on November 15, 2012. The Reality Deck, a 416 screen super-high resolution virtual reality four-walled surround-view theater, is the largest resolution immersive display ever built driven by a graphic supercomputer. Its purpose and primary design principle is to enable scientists, engineers and physicians to tackle modern-age problems that require the visualization of vast amounts of data. The 18-node visualization cluster provides the rendering backbone for the Reality Deck facility. Each node features dual Intel Xeon CPUs, each with 6 cores, as well as 48 GB of RAM and 1 TB of local storage. The nodes are interconnected over Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet. Every machine contains 4 AMD Firepro V9800 GPUs that can drive up to 6 monitors at their native resolution. Effectively, each cluster node can drive up to 24 monitors for almost 90 megapixels of visual space..