Filed under: Displays

Leave it to space nerds with money to come up with the world’s highest resolution visualization system. NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames has created the 128-screen hyperwall-2, a mega display capable of rendering one quarter billion pixels. Hyperwall-2 measures 23- x 10-feet of LCD goodness, and is powered by 128 GPUs and 1,024 processor cores with 74 teraflops of peak processing power. To top things off, 475 terabytes of storage keep the system rolling. All in all, hyperwall-2 has more than 100 times the processing power of its poor predecessor, hyperwall, from 2002. The elder hyperwall was unavailable for comment and is most likely on an alcoholic bender somewhere, complaining about “kids these days.”

[Thanks, james]

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Filed under: Wireless

We knew it! There was just no way a single WiFi router was going to provide coverage from Mercury to Pluto. In order to ensure that all intergalactic beings are given fair and equal access to the intarwebz (and to build a “constellation” that’ll act as a space-based network for communication, data storage and Earth observations, too), NASA is syncing up with m2mi. Of course, these two entities have worked together on occasion before, but this go ’round, they’re looking to craft (relatively) minuscule nanosats that weigh between 11 and 110-pounds and could be placed in low Earth orbit in order to create a new telecommunications and networking system. As expected, nary a launch date is even hinted at, but while we lowly Earthlings worry over the eventual rollout of 4G services, these two hotshots will be focusing on 5G — which incorporates VoIP, video, data, wireless and an integrated machine-to-machine intelligence layer. Far out.

[Via CNET]

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