HPC MSU

Scientific Visualization at the HPC²

The need for large-scale scientific visualization capabilities at the HPC² are nearly as great as the need for large-scale computational capabilities. The HPC² has long been the home of many very high performance visualization systems. Historically, these systems have been large SGI Onyx and Onyx2 graphics servers, but more recently experimentation has begun on using Linux-based PC clusters for visualization needs as well.

In December 2007, the HPC² installed a Mechdyne/Fakespace FLEX virtual reality environment. This system is reconfigurable and can be used as a traditional CAVE, in which the walls are configured to form a cube. In this configuration 10ft x 7.5 ft stereoscopic images are projected onto the front, left, and right walls as well as the floor. Inertial-ultrasonic motion tracking provides the user with an immersive virtual reality experience. The right wall of the system may also be opened up to ninety degrees to provide a single 20ft x 7.5ft flat vertical display. This system replaced an older Mechdyne CAVE system installed at the HPC² in 1998 and is used for collaborative research in such areas as geosciences, computational fluid dynamics, and computational chemistry.

Each researcher with high performance visualization requirements is provided with a desktop workstation with high-end graphics. These desktops are generally either an SGI or SUN workstation, or a Linux PC with a workstation-level graphics card. In addition to their desktops, researchers also have access to an eight processor (500MHz MIPS R14000) SGI Onyx2 with dual InfiniteReality4 graphics pipes and 16GB of memory, a four processor SGI Onyx2 with InfiniteReality3 graphics and 4GB of memory, and a twenty node IBM Intellistation Linux Cluster.

The Linux Cluster (named "Gremlin") is composed of four IBM Intellistation Z Pro workstations with 3.06GHz Xeon processors, 2GB of memory, and NVIDIA Quadro FX3000G graphics cards with 256MB of video memory, and sixteen IBM Intellistation M Pro workstations with 3.2GHz Pentium4 processors, 2GB of memory and NVIDIA GeForce FX5950 graphics cards with 256MB of video memory. The four Z Pro systems now drive the virtual reality system. The cluster processes the OpenGL graphics instructions in parallel on the sixteen M Pro systems using Chromium, and composites the results using the Z Pro workstations, which then draw the results on the monitor. More detailed information about Gremlin is available on the Gremlin webpages.