In article ,
Lee Michaels wrote:

"Gary Heston" wrote

I'd say you're definantly a niche market, with that many displays
required.
Have you looked into clusters? That would allow lots of monitors to be
supported, provide lots of CPUs and memory, and improve reliability.


OK, you are in an area that I have not heard of. What are clusters? The
present solution is to configure various windows machines with either 4, 6.
8 or 12 monitors. Then put them nex to each other.

Clusters are interconnected systems; they can be configured in various
ways, you'd probably want a load-balancing setup. Downside is that where
Windows is concerned, only server operating systems support clusters.

A search of www.microsoft.com will produce more and more detailed info.

Another problem is drivers. Many of these systems do not allow monitors to
be configured three high. So we configure two sets of whatever on the
bottom two high. Then a third unit on top, spread across the top of the
other units. They are then configured as a horizontal configuration. Then
the whole thing is run from three mice and micro keyboards. We use the
keyboards very little for these programs.

Sounds like an impresive setup. Most of what I take care of is in racks.

If you have any other suggestions, like the clusters, etc, send them along.
I am in research mode for the next systems to be installed in the next 3 - 6
months.

You might contact your video adapter vendor to see if they'll do a custom
driver for you, or provide the source code to a developer working for you
to get it to handle your preferred monitor configuration.

Get an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2008 and try running your application
on it. While you don't need most of the services (just disable them), its'
superior memory management and less "user experience" crud should prove
to be much more stable. Anything running on XP should run on it with no
problems.

I gather your application isn't available on Linux/Unix/BSD; if it were
and was multithreaded, a Linux cluster would be an excellent choice.


Gary

--
Gary Heston http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

Why is it that these days, the words "What idiot" are so frequently
followed by the words "at Microsoft"?