Imagine standing in a room, with a three-dimensional HIV-1 protease floating before your eyes. As big as a boulder, the enzyme's craggy surface seems so close you can almost touch it. But put out your hands, and you'll touch naught but air.
Welcome to the Delaware Biotechnology Institute's (DBI) Visualization Studio. In a darkened room on the campus of the University of Delaware, Newark, research assistant Praveen Thiagarajan is showing off the DBI's newest core facility. The Studio's most obvious feature is a 100-square-foot display with a resolution of nearly 2,500 x 1,024 pixels. But behind the scenes--both literally and figuratively--lies the system's heart: a Silicon Graphics (SGI) Reality Center®, powered by a six-processor SGI Onyx 3200 supercomputer with two graphics pipes driving a pair of rear-mounted projectors.
When running standard software, the screen behaves like any computer monitor--only much, much bigger. But when Thiagarajan executes software specifically written for ...
