The Sphere in Las Vegas requires four petabytes of storage

Las Vegas has become more attractive in the past six months. The Sphere has been delighting visitors since September last year. A huge, sparkling ball with a 360-degree viewing surface to rival casinos. Now the LED dome operators have released new technical details.

The operators owe a large part of the fact that the dome in Las Vegas stands up to a company in Upper Austria. Façade construction specialist Seele from Schörfling am Attersee is responsible for the construction of the dome. Seele developed an infrastructure specifically for The Sphere to which the stage and LED technology are bonded in order to deliver consistent picture quality. A total of 47,500 pieces were installed. In total, an area equivalent to two football fields was built.

But this is not enough. To ensure that this multi-purpose spherical hall performs its tasks, many additional technologies have been installed. As reported in a recent blog post, the equivalent of approximately four petabytes (4,000 TB) of flash memory is used to ensure a transfer rate of 400 GB/s. This has been made necessary by the current film being shown at The Sphere, “Postcard from Earth,” explains the storage infrastructure partner, Hitachi Content Software for File System. The system consists of 27 codes, which together contain 4 petabytes of flash memory. This is the only way to view a Darren Aronofsky film in 16K.

By the way: the exhibition area inside is 15,000 square meters. The outer wall covers an area of ​​54,000 square meters. Enough space to display enough ads. But one title is certain: the world's largest LED wall.

Another losing deal

The outside wall actually had a basketball, a Halloween pumpkin, and also a giant emoji. In order to rent advertising space for a day, you have to spend your money deep. The cost of the 54,000 square meter area is $450,000 per day for one day. On the other hand, an entire week costs $650,000. Intel, Sony, Microsoft, and Google took advantage of this at CES (Consumer Electronics Show).

However: the field is still a losing proposition. The company announced its first numbers in February. According to this, $167.8 million has been collected since its opening in September. But the cost was just under $193.9 million. (to forbid)