Sandia scientists wanted to get inside a nuclear bomb - from the safety of their offices. But standard monitors at the national labs couldn't display the complex information generated by its supercomputers. So they built something that could: The View Corridor is the world's highest-resolution screen. At 20 megapixels, the 13- by 10-foot display is 10 times crisper than HDTV. The picture is generated by a cluster of 64 networked PCs equipped with nVidia gaming graphics cards and 16 off-the-shelf digital projectors, all working in tandem. The scalable display renders in real time, meaning the data can be panned, zoomed, or rotated. "Researchers and engineers can now walk around and look at detailed scientific data rather than peer at it through a porthole," says Carl Leishman, one of the project's leaders. So far, the screen has been used primarily to investigate simulated weapon explosions and design, but it will also come in handy when exploring 3-D models of proteins, earthquake activity, and, in the middle of the night, Quake III.
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