Feature - CineGrid: lend some power to your pixels

RENCI’s tele-immersion room, which features a 10-foot by 5-foot rear projection display for stereoscopic viewing at four times HD resolution, will serve as its node on CineGrid. Image courtesy of Josh Coyle, RENCI

High-resolution digital content. A 10-foot by 5-foot rear projection stereoscopic screen with four times high-definition resolution…

Interested?

If you’re into visual media, get an eyeful of CineGrid, a non-profit organization aimed at bringing together filmmakers, visualization specialists and digital media experts, using grid computing technologies for networked collaboration.

Creating the future

CineGrid members work together to explore the feasibility of different networking approaches for emerging applications of media-rich forms of art, entertainment, distance learning, scientific visualization, remote collaboration and international cultural exchange.

A new member of the CineGrid collaboration is the Renaissance Computing Institute, or RENCI, currently working to connect its CineGrid node to the North Carolina Research and Education Network at 1 gigabit per second, and from there to high-speed research networks worldwide that host CineGrid nodes. The 1 Gb/s connection eventually will be upgraded to allow data transfer rates of 10 Gb/s.

CineGrid hopes to build a worldwide community that uses high-performance grids and grid infrastructure to explore new ways of sharing and producing media-rich content for education, research, entertainment and artistic expression. Image courtesy of CineGrid

Education, entertainment, art

“CineGrid is an exciting experiment in providing distributed media content, including film clips, scientific visualizations and streaming performances, through a grid environment that includes high-speed networks, computing resources, data storage capabilities and collaboration tools,” said Ray Idaszak, director of RENCI’s visualization and collaborative environments group and a member of the CineGrid executive committee.

“Much of the work on CineGrid will involve looking at new ways to present and to share digital media and scientific images, but many filmmakers and film studios are also interested in using a grid environment for editing, color work, and obtaining content from diverse locations.”

RENCI plans to be the first CineGrid node to offer three-dimensional, stereoscopic content at extremely high resolution—four times the resolution of high definition TV. The institute plans to purchased two 4K video cameras to create content for the grid.

“In the long run, we hope that sharing this technology and CineGrid content with the North Carolina film community will become a way to attract more film production to the state,” Idaszak said.

- Karen Green, RENCI