Presentations in the Data Arena

Alongside the 6 computers which comprise the DA's "image-generation cluster", there is a 7th separate server, specially setup to drive the entire display all by itself. This computer is called Solo (because it operates alone - not Han Solo from Star Wars!). Solo uses the entire 360º screen. Technically speaking it is less powerful than the cluster, but more convenient for straightforward presentations and first-time users. There's no cluster synchronisation. You can't miss. It's one computer, with 3 x GPUs.

Solo is used to display pdf presentations, web applications, play audio, display images, and other basic tasks. The difference is that there are 10576x1200 pixels. Essentially six HD screens, side-by-side. In total, the screen is 31m in circumference, and 4m high. A massive display for one computer.

Solo is a good choice for presentations.

Google Slides

For presentations, we prefer to work with Google Slides for presentations. As a web application, presentations can be made by you on your computer, and displayed in the DA instantly. There is nothing to download, your slides always stay onlnie. We then simple display them in a web-browser on Solo (such as Chrome or Firefox) and enter the URL for your slides. Done. They're on the DA Screen.

👉 To get started with Google Slides, follow our tutorial here.

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PDFs

Alternatively, we can display PDFs (and have for many years). Modern display tools include Okular, LibreOffice, qpdfview (and many more) to view documents. We can use any of these on Solo if you have PDFs to display. Custom bash scripts let automate layouts in the Data Arena. The Data Arena staff can assist you with these. It's best to book some time to set things up.

To get started, upload and transfer your presentation files to us, then make a booking to start testing.