DisplayCluster: An Interactive Visualization Environment for Tiled Displays

Abstract

Display Cluster is an interactive visualization environment for cluster-driven tiled displays. It provides a dynamic, desktop-like windowing system with built-in media viewing capability that supports ultra high-resolution imagery and video content and streaming that allows arbitrary applications from remote sources (such as laptops or remote visualization machines) to be shown. This support extends to high-performance parallel visualization applications, enabling interactive streaming and display for hundred-mega pixel dynamic content. Display Cluster also supports multi-user, multi-modal interaction via devices such as joysticks, smart phones, and the Microsoft Kinect. Further, our environment provides a Python-based scripting interface to automate any set of interactions. In this paper, we describe the features and architecture of Display Cluster, compare it to existing tiled display environments, and present examples of how it can combine the capabilities of large-scale remote visualization clusters and high-resolution tiled display systems. In particular, we demonstrate that Display Cluster can stream and display up to 36 mega pixels in real time and as many as 144 mega pixels interactively, which is 3× faster and 4× larger than other available display environments. Further, we achieve over a gig pixel per second of aggregate bandwidth streaming between a remote visualization cluster and our tiled display system.