[Beowulf] a cluster to drive a wall of monitors

[Alvin Oga]

hi ya evan

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Evan Cull wrote:

> I'm helping with a project that want's to drive a wall of about 50 LCD 
> panels with a linux cluster running Syzygy:
> http://www.isl.uiuc.edu/syzygy.htm

i didn't see 4, 16, 50 monitors at that site :-) but maybe i didnt look
in the right places or with the right eyeballs

for 2x3 or more monitors ..

	http://www.linux-1u.net/X11/Quad/

- a wall of 16 monitors

	http://www.linux-1u.net/X11/Quad/gstreamer.net/vw1.png
	http://www.linux-1u.net/X11/Quad/gstreamer.net/vw2.png

	http://www.linux-1u.net/X11/Quad/gstreamer.net/video-wall-howto.html

the trick is to divide out the one pic into 1/4 pics each
and the bracket between each adjacent lcd to be minimal and
non-distracting fromt eh whole image displayed on 4 or more monitors

	lots of XF86Config editing and tweeking

doing that with *.jpg is almost trivial 

doing that with *.mpeg with mplayer/zine becomes a fun project

> I was considering a cluster of either 50 single processor nodes or 25 
> dual processor + dual output graphics card nodes.  I suppose 50 dual 

an itty bitty P3-800 equivalent cpu can trivially play an mpeg file
( you dont need horsepower to play mpegs )

if you are encoding ... that might be trickier .. and that you'd
need to keep the video and audio in sync ( not trivial )
	- lots of rejected *.mpegs due to sound and video being
	out of sync ( even on the fastest pcs )

> Does anyone here have experience buying rackmountable cluster nodes 
> *with graphics cards* who can point me to a vendor?

we sell those puppises, which is half the fun .. :-) 

> For that matter, have any of you built a similar system & have any 
> suggestions / comments?

depending on where the movies are being played, remote admin or not
and if they "hit reset" or powerfailures will be yur biggest problem
- we have 100 systems in 100 cities across this itty-bitty-land

c ya
alvin