NVidia has a press release on the newest offering at the California Academy of Sciences: An impressive 75-foot display running at 4k x 4k, powered by 24 NVidia GPU’s.

Few of the planetarium’s 750,000 annual visitors realize the technological complexity behind such a show. The visualization team uses a dozen Quadro workstations to create and render each scene. A room full of humming servers uses another 12 GPUs to output video and interact with digital content in real-time – which gives the Morrison Planetarium team incredible power and flexibility.

They use 12 for playback, and 12 for rendering, although I’m not entirely sure what that entails.  The entire rig is fairly impressive, it looks like they’re using full-height rack-mount systems, so they’ve got a few racks of computers driving the thing.  The entire setup can be “driven” like a computer game, so it’s actually an interactive display and not your classic movie environment.  Be sure to watch the video.

via California Academy of Sciences Uses GPUs to Tell Story of Life « NVIDIA.