http://www.maximumpc.com | FEB 09 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|5&
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK MADEO
Interstellar
Tech
Support
Greatest
GeekJ O B SSpace may be the fi nal frontier, but so far it’s an ex-
clusive destination reserved for only a few astronauts
and billionaire space tourists such as game developer
Richard Garriott. For the rest of us, the closest we’ll ever
get to touching the stars is a visit to the local planetar-
ium. Fortunately, that experience is closer than ever to
the real thing thanks to amazing advances in modern
planetarium technology. Star balls and laser-based
optical projectors seem archaic when compared to the
fully digital projection systems that harness the muscle
of computer clusters to render 3D images. Jon Britton,
the senior system engineer at San Francisco’s Morrison
Planetarium, is one of the talented people bootstrapping
planetarium technology into the digital age.
With a background in computer science and virtual
systems engineering, Jon joined the staff at the new
California Academy of Sciences to lead the engineering
team responsible for wiring the entire building. Not an
easy task when the facility is a single structure housing
dozens of complicated exhibits, including an aquarium,
a self-contained rainforest, and one of the largest—and
most technologically advanced—planetariums in the
world. Jon and his team designed a system of three com-
puting clusters that each channel gigabits of visual data
through a high-speed network to a set of six $20,000
Projection Design projectors that combine their images
to simulate one massive display. And as impressive asJon Britton holds the key(board)
to space travel with enough
awesome computing power to
simulate entire galaxies
BY NORMAN CHAN