Presto Electro

I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I write all of my updates on a little, tiny netbook. Its screen is about ten inches across, and its resolution is a teensy 1024 by 600. It's small. Very small. Earlier today I read an article on this very screen that suddenly made it feel a whole lot smaller…

The article was about the UNT Research and Visualization Environment (RAVE). RAVE provides powerful and HUMONGOUS computing resources to faculty and students to help them visualize and understand the impossibly large amounts of data computers are capable of coagulating these days.

Before today, I thought the 24" wide-screen monitors in the GAB Lab were preposterously large, but this array of monitors (pictured above) could adequately display the contents of almost 70 screens the size of my laptop, and the cluster attached to them guarantees they won't even stutter when they do it!

Writing an article on a tiny screen is not so bad, but when I was trying to design a box diagram the other day (for a project in Digital Systems Design) I would have done almost anything for 40 megapixels to move around in…

This article also answered a question I've been wondering about for some time. The walls at UNT are papered with huge posters summarizing undergrad and graduate student projects, and I never knew how they managed to print something so enormous. Now that I know about the visualization environment, I'm pretty sure that beastly printers like this one are responsible:

Now I know, if I ever need to tackle a problem that is making my laptop burst at the seams, I've got all sorts of gigantic resources available to me at UNT.