In brief: Not content with powering the generative AI revolution, Nvidia has revealed that its hardware is also creating the interior and exterior visuals of Las Vegas’ Sphere. The largest spherical building in the world has 1.2 million programmable LEDs on its outer surface, powered by 150 RTX A6000 GPUs.
Opened on September 29, 2023, the $2.3 billion Sphere had been under construction since 2019. The 366 feet high and 516 feet wide building covers almost 750,000 square feet, and is best known for its exterior, called the Exosphere, which can create amazing images with its 1.2 million LED pucks, each of them containing 48 individual programmable LEDs.
The inside of the Sphere is just as impressive: a 250-foot high, floor-to-ceiling 16K x 16K display. The company behind the project says the interior has 160,000 square feet – or roughly the area of three football fields – worth of programmable space.
That sort of display setup requires some hefty hardware. Nvidia has just revealed that the Sphere is powered by 150 of its RTX A6000 GPUs, each one featuring over 10,000 cores, 48GB of VRAM, and a 300W TDP. A single card is around $5,000, so buying 150 will cost in the region of $750,000, and they could consume 45,000W if running at full power.
To ensure that all the display panels act as one synchronized canvas, Nvidia offered its advanced interconnection technologies, including BlueField DPUs and ConnectX-6 Dx NICs, along with DOCA Firefly Service and Nvidia Rivermax Software.
The video content is created by Sphere Studios at its Burbank, California, facility before being digitally transferred to the Sphere in Las Vegas. Content is then streamed in real-time to rack-mounted workstations containing the RTX A6000 GPUs, allowing performance capable of delivering three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second.
Rivermax helps provide media streaming, while BlueField DPUs facilitate precision timing through the DOCA Firefly Service, which, according to Nvidia, synchronizes clocks in a network with sub-microsecond accuracy.
In addition to the high-resolution visuals, the Sphere also boasts advanced concert-grade sound, haptic seats, and atmospheric effects such as wind and scents.