Massive Pixel Environment (MPE)

Purpose

Massive Pixel Environment is a library for extending Processing sketches to multi-node tiled displays. This library makes it possible to render interactive Processing sketches across distributed computing systems on many displays. It is intended for tiled display systems, but works in many other types of environments. With simple modifications, a sketch can be rendered across a cluster at the native resolution of the displays, and can greatly increase the amount of data that can be visualized at one time. This library is intended to run on Linux and OSX-based clusters.

This library is developed from scratch at the TACC/ACES Visualization Lab with inspiration from Most Pixels Ever, developed by Daniel Shiffman.

This work was made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Grant: HD-51475-11, A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualization for the Humanities.

Massive Pixel Environment features:

• Create interactive multimedia and data visualizations that span multiple displays, at a resolution and scale never before possible
• Enables extremely high resolution Processing sketches -- tested on the 328 Megapixel Stallion display cluster at the TACC/ACES Visualization Lab

The Massive Pixel Environment library is available for download on GitHub. Massive Pixel Environment is free software issued by the University of Texas at Austin under the BSD license.

TACC Staff

Brandt Westing
Visualization Laboratory Manager
Research Engineering/Scientist Associate II

Rob Turknett
Digital Media, Arts & Humanities Coordinator