Real-time High-resolution Visualisation

Abstract

While visualisation often strives for abstraction, the interactive exploration of large scientific data sets like densely sampled 3D fields or massive particle data sets still benefits from rendering their graphical representation in large detail on high-resolution displays such as Powerwalls or tiled display walls driven by multiple GPUs or even GPU clusters. Such visualisation systems are typically rather unique in their setup of hardware and software which makes transferring a visualisation application from one high-resolution system to another one a complicated task. As more and more such visualisation systems get installed, collaboration becomes desirable in the sense of sharing such a visualisation running on one site in real time with another highresolution display on a remote site while at the same time communicating via video and audio. Since typical video conference solutions or web-based collaboration tools often cannot deal with resolutions exceeding 4K, with stereo displays or with multi- GPU setups, we designed and implemented a new system based on state-of-the-art hardware and software technologies to transmit high-resolution visualisations including video and audio streams via the internet to remote large displays and back. Our system architecture is built on efficient capturing, encoding and transmission of pixel streams and thus supports a multitude of configurations combining audio and video streams in a generic approach.