[AG-TECH] AG on >10 displays

[Christoph Willing]

On 02/08/2007, at 3:18 AM, Cindy Sievers wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if anyone was displaying AG on more than 4  
> monitors?  Maybe on something like a Powerwall set up......what  
> video display cards seem to work?  Are you running on several  
> machines?  VGA or DVI?
> I suppose I could run several video display machines to avoid a  
> performance hit with service managers on each machine....but I  
> thought I'd check and see if others are successfully doing this  
> already...


Cindy,

See this talk for 2005 AG Retreat:
	http://www-new.mcs.anl.gov/fl/flevents/ag/agr05/talks/ 
agr05_willing_T_cluster.ppt

Looking back at it now, it stikes me how little real information  
there is in a power point presentation.

To summarise it briefly: using DMX allows a single desktop to be  
spread across an arbitrary number of physical machines; to the  
operator it behaves like a normal single display machine. Machines  
are currently available with 2 PCIe slots; each slot could house a  
quad output card such as NVidia NVS 440 (http://www.nvidia.com/page/ 
quadronvs.html), giving 8 video outputs in a single machine. Using  
DMX, just a 2 machine cluster would give you 16 output screens.

The NVS 440 video card is aimed at 2D performance. For anything more  
ambitious, you'd be better off using higher quality dual output cards  
instead of the quad output cards. In this case you'd need 3 machines  
(each with 4 outputs) to achieve 12 screen outputs.


Any of the machines in the cluster can also perform capture duties.


chris


Christoph Willing                       +61 7 3365 8350
QCIF Access Grid Manager
University of Queensland