Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last month joined HPE CEO Antonio Neri on stage at the massive Las Vegas Sphere entertainment venue to talk about GPU-accelerated computing and the growing AI partnership between the two companies, but one thing they did not touch on was the fact that the 16x16K video displays surrounding them inside the Sphere are powered by Nvidia GPUs.
Nvidia, which also showcased the unique entertainment experience at the Sphere, the 366-feet-high, 516-feet-wide dome just off the Las Vegas Strip, during its own GTC conference last March, revealed this week that the Sphere relies on 150 Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs to help enable widely-acclaimed floor-to-ceiling visual displays inside its dome, as well as giant Exosphere LED screen on its exterior, which is made up of 1.2 million programmable LED pucks.
Nvidia also said in a blog post that the Sphere is supported by its BlueField DPUs and Nvidia ConnectX-6 Dx NICs — along with the Nvidia DOCA Firefly Service and Nvidia Rivermax software for media streaming — to ensure that all the display panels act as one synchronized canvas. The Rivermax software enables direct data transfers to and from the GPUs to work in concert with the hardware to eliminate jitter and optimize latency, the company said.
Nvidia also provided GPUs for Sphere Studios, the Burbank, California, facility that creates video content for the Sphere and then transfers it digitally to the Las Vegas venue. The studio’s custom image processing software runs on Lenovo servers powered by Nvidia A40 GPUs. The content is then streamed in real time to rack-mounted workstations equipped with Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs, achieving unprecedented performance capable of delivering three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second.