Visualisation Cluster

The current Visualisation Cluster is the driving force behind the Reality Cube and the Reality Theatre. The cluster consists of 8 high-end HP workstations (xw8600) in a master-slave setup:

• The master node is used for user input
• Each slave node delivers 3D images to one projector in the Reality Cube or Reality Theatre
• Special genlocking hardware is used to synchronize the images produced by the nodes.
• One of the machines is running Windows (the others all use Linux) to produce a single giant desktop.

The previous Visualisation Cluster has been in use since 2005 and consisted of 5 HP9300 workstations. This has gradually replaced the SGI Onyx3400.

 

Specifications

All nodes in the Visualisation Cluster have the following specifications:

• HP xw8600 workstation
• Quad Xeon 3.0 GHz
• 2 GB memory
• Nvidia QuadroFX5800 graphics card (each with 4GB of onboard memory) with additional genlock board
• 1Gb/s network interface to shared file server