CityWall: A 3x3 video wall with use of super abacus

Abstract

In the modern mass communication, video walls are effective tools to communicate with people. You may find them in the various exhibitions. Companies like to use video walls to demonstrate their products, and people like to use video walls to pursue higher visual enjoyment. There are many reasons for developing a new video wall system. For example, the traditional video walls are too expensive and they are lack of applications. As a result, we need to find a solution to overcome these drawbacks. In this project, we aim to build a PC cluster video wall system. The cluster is called Abacus which is a supercomputer designed for multimedia applications. Linux Operating System is chosen as its’ stable system and high performance. Besides, we have used some open source libraries to complete this project, for instance SMPEG, SDL and LAM/MPI. The communication method used is to send message among the network. We have applied two techniques to synchronize the network, one is barrier synchronization and the other one is continuously monitoring. CityWall, raises the novel idea that we can build a low-cost software video wall with PC cluster to suit the increasing demand. It has a lot of advantages. It is purely software based which makes it be low-cost and high-efficiency. It is very portable on the Unix-like environment as its’ cross-platform libraries. Also, it is an open source project that we can contribute to the society. In addition to the standard video player functions, we have implemented some applications on it such as filtering, zooming, panning, and interpolation. To sum up, this is a very challenging project that we need to explore the possibility of implementing software video wall, but I have successfully overcome a lot of difficulties and found out the solutions to those technical problems. My four achievements are (1) configured a video wall system, (2) developed a video wall model, (3) developed a video wall MPEG player, and (4) enhanced the quality and functionality of the system.