Performance and usability tradeoff in a cluster display wall

•An efficient cluster display wall hemisphere infrastructure can be built up with commodity hardware.•The relationship between the system performance and user's perception is analyzed in different scenarios.•Users with lower Multimedia Experience Level show more satisfaction with a cluster display wall system.•There is a positive correlation of the performance in relation to the usability parameters of effectiveness and efficiency.•The system performance in relation to the system and users characteristics can be modeled. Cluster-based display walls provide cost-effective and scalable display infrastructures with high resolution and large display area, making them suitable for a wide range of high-resolution applications. As a consequence, a wide offer of new cluster display-wall platforms together with their software frameworks have been proposed. Their performance and the satisfaction of their users have aroused the interest of some researchers. This work is focused on the Liquid Galaxy cluster display wall originally built to run Google Earth to create an immersive experience for the users. In this paper, the Liquid Galaxy is benchmarked running Google Earth, as a representative interactive application with high performance requirements, in different configurations and environments, to test the satisfaction, effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, we wish to know how users react to the system performance. In order to do so, we use a performance metric defined in previous research to relate the performance of the system with the user’s perception. Taking into account the trend of this metric in the experimentation, we model the behavior of the system in a way that the performance for any given visualization cluster running Google Earth could be predicted by using a reference system.