With a few keystrokes, Chris Henze calls up the computer image of a delta-winged airplane, its wings and fuselage covered with bright bands of color depicting simulated airflow.

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette NASA's Chris Henze with the Hyperwall set up last week for the SC2004 supercomputing conference here. The wall is projecting large scale cosmology-simulations showing the formation of the universe from the Big Bang to today. Click photo for larger image.

One such image can be striking, but Henze's keystrokes have summoned forth 36 images of the craft, all similar but each one a little different from the next, displayed on nine, flat-panel monitors arranged in a matrix about 5 feet wide and almost as high. The effect, at first glance, is overwhelming.

But this display, which NASA calls a Hyperwall, is actually a tool to help make sense of the flood of data routinely pumped out by supercomputers, such as the new Columbia computer. That supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California can perform more than 50 trillion calculations every second, making it the second-fastest on the planet.

Displaying dozens or even hundreds of images simultaneously might seem a formula for confusion. But people have an inborn skill for detecting visual patterns, so such displays actually help users sort through a multitude of computer simulations, said Henze, a senior research scientist at Ames.

NASA was showing off this Hyperwall ---- actually a mini-version of Ames' 15-foot-wide, 9-foot-high original ---- last week at the SC2004 supercomputing conference in Pittsburgh. But the technology, generically called "powerwalls," is hardly exclusive to NASA.

Many high-performance computing centers make use of these powerwalls. "It's become a necessity," said Thomas Zacharia, associate director for computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has a powerwall measuring 30 feet wide and 10 feet high.

The lab's need for such displays will be critical by 2006, when Oak Ridge will have a computer capable of 100 trillion calculations per second and a memory of 64 trillion bytes, or 64 terabytes, Zacharia said.

"One data dump is 64 terabytes," he added, a sense of wonder in his voice. Researchers will need to spread that data out on powerwalls "just to even find out if the calculations are correct."

The displays evoke scenes from science fiction films, notably Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report." In that 2002 film, the character played by Tom Cruise would display multiple images and data on a wall-size translucent screen, sorting through it all by moving or discarding information by motioning with his fingers.

Henze, the "visualization" lead for Ames' Columbia computer, said one version of the Hyperwall allows users to manipulate data and images by touching the screens. One version even includes a "haptic" interface, which gives users the sense that they can feel the images.

"You can pull an atom off [of an image of a molecule] and sort of feel it resist coming off," he said.

But generally, the simpler the display the better. Attempts at using virtual reality, for instance, were unfruitful, Henze said. People tend to feel uncomfortable wearing the special goggles that give them the sense that they are standing within a three-dimensional image, he explained, and the medium ends up overpowering the data.

Powerwalls, by contrast, seem very natural ---- simply a much bigger version of the familiar desktop monitor.

"In one sense, it's nothing new," Henze said of the Hyperwall. "Everybody has always tried to open up lots of windows" on their monitor displays, but they quickly run out of space on even the largest screens. Wall-size monitors simply increase the space available.

"This is just like what mission control did," he said of the Hyperwall concept. "They just put as much stuff up on the board as they could."

The powerwalls allow displays at very high resolutions, however. In one project at Oak Ridge, for instance, researchers used the powerwall to study high-resolution aerial photographs. They could use the display to find areas of interest and then zoom in to examine it in detail. In some cases, the resolution and the magnification were so great that observers would actually see the grain from the original film, Zacharia said.

Of course, it's possible to view such images at high magnification on a desktop monitor, Henze acknowledged. But it becomes more difficult to orient the blown-up portion with the rest of the image, which can't be seen on a desktop display.

For wind tunnel simulations of the airplane, which is being designed for release from an orbiter into the atmosphere of Mars, Henze arranged the images in a grid ---- left to right, in order of increasing wind speed and, top to bottom, from nose-up to nose-down angles of attack.

"Ninety percent of these are not interesting," he said, but by displaying them in these grids the designers can quickly identify the ones that are interesting ---- the points where the plane becomes unstable, as indicated by white areas on the wings.

"Our visual systems are good at finding these breakpoints," Henze explained, noting designers used to make printouts of the images and lay them on their desk to do the same sort of sorting and sifting. Doing it on the Hyperwall made short work of it.

For the Martian plane study, that was no small feat; the simulation runs produced 35,000 data sets.