One of TLC2's unique resources is the visualization laboratory. Researchers throughout campus and the greater Houston research community come to this facility to see their data come alive.
Visualization theatre
TLC2 is in the process of completing an upgrade of its visualization facility. The upgraded facility will have a visualization theatre with 34 seats. Two 8 Mpixel Sony projectors for stereographic projection will be driven by an 83 GF 16GB Opteron dual core dual socket four node Linux visualization cluster with eight nVidia Quadro fx4500 graphics processors.
The Amira visualization software package is installed on the cluster. Licenses for laptops and individual workstations are also available.
Visualization for larger audiences
The cluster can also drive projectors in TLC2’s two classrooms, PGH 200 (48 seats) and PGH 232 (126 seats), and TLC2’s conference room PGH 218.
Remote visualization
TLC2 is also planning to make available at least five setups for remote visualization. Each remote setup will have a 9Mpixel 22” display and either a 42” or a 50” plasma display, a dual processor 10 GF, 2GB Opteron graphics workstation with nVidia Quadro fx3400 graphics processor and a network switch with 48 GigE ports and a 10 Gbps uplink to TLC2 computational resources for rendering, and shared storage resources. The plan is to establish a dedicated on-campus network for remote/distributed visualization in the same spirit as for the Distributed Storage Network.
