Visualization in aerospace research with a large wall display system

National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan has built a large-scale visualization system with a large wall-type display. The system has been operational since April 2001 and comprises a 4.6 x 1.5-meter (15 x 5-foot) rear projection screen with 3 BARCO 812 high-resolution CRT projectors. The reason we adopted the 3-gun CRT projectors is support for stereoscopic viewing, ease with color/luminosity matching and accuracy of edge-blending. The system is driven by a new SGI Onyx 3400 server of distributed shared-memory architecture with 32 CPUs, 64Gbytes memory, 1.5TBytcs FC PAID disk and 6 IR3 graphics pipelines. Software is another important issue for us to make full use of the system. We have introduced some applications available in a multi-projector environment such as AVS/MPE, EnSight Gold and COVISE, and been developing some software tools that create volumetric images with using SGI graphics libraries. The system is mainly used for visualization of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in aerospace research. Visualized CFD results are of our help for designing an improved configuration of aerospace vehicles and analyzing their aerodynamic performances. These days we also use it for various collaborations among researchers.