Salford University has created a world class Think Lab, centred on delivering world class visualisation and collaboration facilities, where multidisciplinary teams of researchers can meet and work together, to solve problems and gain insight

The Think Lab was designed from the ground up, representing a total refurbishment of part of an existing building. OCF worked with their partners, the University and the building team (architects and builders) to provide the overall solution, from design through to installation and final use

OCF provided the complete technical compute requriements of the project, with their partners Fakespace and ORAD. This included all of the display environment together with all of the graphics compute infrastructure

The Think Lab is comprised of a cluster of IBM Intellistations driving a number of displays, which include

* 2 Channel Powerwall
* Number of Plasma screens

Video from the cluster can be routed to different parts of the centre via a central matrix.

The cluster uses an ORAD VR-X card that can be used to scale the graphics performance of individual nodes of the cluster. The system at Salford is currently the fastest in UK academia

In the main debating chamber, the powerwall provides the main display area. Integrated into the powerwall is an Access Grid with video conferencing capabilities to the Lab. The main debating chamber is made up of a 5m wide screen, full 5.1 audio support and various video cameras for the Access Grid system

In addition to the cluster technology from ORAD, the graphics cluster also runs IBM DCV software which provides Scalable Visualisation and Remote Visualisation capabilities