wall


The "wall" package contains code to steer a wall of screens with multiple computers. To give a feeling, below is a picture, taken in 2010, of the LAL little wall (our wallino) used for the developments and done with eight screens and four Macs at that time.

ATLAS_LAL_30_March_2010.jpg

We had a period (2012-2017) with twelve screens (three per machine, see the Gallery), but now (2018) one screen and one machine are out, then we run with nine screens (and then the three remaining Macs).

Despite that we can show nice things (now more related to cosmology), for the moment there is no funding to have a renew of our hardware, but anyway we "keep going" the developments of the software since this kind of exercice permits us to do interesting coding related to parallelisation for visualisation.

The software is not tied to our platform and can probably be run on any set of macs or Linuxes (and Windows for the machines handling the screens) at the moment that one machine (the master) can spawn remote tasks (the "per screen" wall_screen programs) through ssh and master/screens can do some "socket connections" with a dedicated port. Right now (2018) we have versions of the wall_master program in X11/OpengGL and Cocoa/OpenGL and versions of the per-screen wall_screen program in Cocoa/Apple-OpenGL, X11/Mesa-OpenGL and Windows/opengl32. (Our wallino configuration is "all macs", but someone may think to have one master Mac or Linux driving a bunch of PCs under Windows for the screens) (for the moment we do not have a version of the "wall_master" program for Windows).

Below a more impressive image, done in 2012, by displaying on the LRI WILD wall of 32 screens and 16 computers (all Macs) :

LHCb_2_WILD_25_Jan_2010.jpg