Featured photo by Y2kcrazyjoker4 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, Link
The Sphere is the new main attraction in Las Vegas and covers an area of almost 81,300 square meters. The Sphere has replaced the Avicii Arena as the largest spherical building in the world. The 54,000 square meters of outdoor space are equipped with 57.6 million LEDs, resulting in 1.2 million pixels (pucks). Each of these pucks is roughly the size of an ice hockey puck. The world’s first 16K LED display covers 15,000 m² of the indoor area.
According to NVIDIA, the Vegas Sphere is powered by 150 RTX A6000 GPUs, each of which has over 10,000 cores, 48 GB of memory and a TDP of 300 W. That’s a total of 1,612,800 cores, 7200 GB of GDDR6 memory and 45,000 W of power consumption when all these GPUs are running at maximum performance.
These 150 NVIDIA RTX GPUs are interconnected via state-of-the-art connectivity technology, including BlueField DPUs and ConnectX-6 Dx NICs, supported by software such as DOCA Firefly Service and NVIDIA Rivermax.²
The average consumption of German households in 2021 was 2828 Kwh¹. This corresponds to 117833 watt hours. This means that, assuming full capacity utilization, graphics cards alone consume as much electricity within two and a half days as a German household does on average over the year.
The entire Sphere requires around 28 megawatts³ to cover its peak energy demand, which is equivalent to the power supply for 21,000 households.
How to get the image onto the sphere
Sphere Studios creates video content at its facility in Burbank, California, and then digitally transmits it to Sphere in Las Vegas. The content is then streamed in real time to rack workstations equipped with NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics processors.
