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SGI Delivers the Most Powerful Collaborative Visualization Available With Visual Area Networking

Posted on: Thursday, 20 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Silicon Graphics today announced that as part of its commitment to address the demand for powerful collaborative visualization, Visual Area Networking (VAN) is now available with high performance support for Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx4(TM) UltimateVision(TM) systems using OpenGL Vizserver(TM) 3.3.

As the first commercial solution for high performance remote visualization and collaboration, SGI's proven solutions now provide nearly 200 VAN server installations and thousands of clients with instant, visual access to large data sets independent of the location of the data or person accessing it. VAN users and collaborative teams now achieve up to three times the interactive performance -- increasing realism, insight and productivity.

Raising the bar again, SGI has increased the performance and interactivity available to remote users and multi-user collaborative teams, enabling them to visually analyze complex data sets and reach decisions faster than ever before. The combination of OpenGL Vizserver 3.3 with Onyx4 and the new Scalable Graphics Capture card can now deliver full screen visual results to remote clients at up to 30 frames per second, with some scientific visualization and engineering analysis applications able to achieve as high as 60 frames per second for full screen results.

Illustrating the benefits of OpenGL Vizserver 3.3 with Onyx4, is WestGrid, a $48 million grid computing infrastructure project that provides high performance computing, networking, and collaboration tools to seven institutions in western Canada. WestGrid is dramatically advancing the visualization capability delivered to the researcher's desktop using an 8-pipe Silicon Graphics Onyx4 as a VAN server at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, B.C.

"We are excited by the level of visualization capability this allows us to deliver to the desktop of our computational community," explains Brian Corrie, collaboration and visualization coordinator for WestGrid. "We are able to deliver very data-intensive interactive, collaborative visualizations between researchers in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, and Banff -- a distance of more than 800 km."

For over three years, customers around the world have turned to SGI's VAN solutions to help accelerate their large data visualization workflows. These customers use VAN to virtualize visual access to their large data sets, eliminating time lost to data copying and improving analysis power. They are able to use their existing OpenGL(R) applications on remote systems and with remote collaborators, unifying distributed teams with the common language of visualization.

"As the importance of visualization technology continues to grow, so has SGI's dedication to developing VAN solutions on our entire visualization product line," said Shawn Underwood, director of marketing, Visual Systems Group, SGI. "With OpenGL Vizserver 3.3, we are able to offer Onyx4 users a dynamic, interactive visual framework with on demand, high performance access to highly scalable and flexible solutions."

Another part of VAN's appeal stems from its ability to support cross platform clients. Users of laptops, PC's and workstations running the Windows(R) or Linux(R) operating system, Sun(TM) Solaris(TM) and IRIX(R) can access scalable visualization resources and collaborate together even if their application of choice only runs on the IRIX server. As a result, heterogeneous clients can all see the same results and share control of the same application.

Since its inception, VAN usage has crossed over traditional computing and industry boundaries. VAN enables users and teams in industries as diverse as manufacturing, government research & defense, grid, education and health care to improve visual access and collaboration with large data sets. With energy and pharmaceutical customers joining the VAN movement, the trend that binds them together is their need to visualize and collaborate on larger and larger business critical data sets.

The OpenGL Vizserver server software is available in different modules for Silicon Graphics Onyx family scalable visualization systems with a special value workstation package available for Silicon Graphics workstations. Client software for Windows, Linux, Solaris and IRIX operating systems are freely downloadable from http://www.sgi.com/.

SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM)

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com/.

About OpenGL

The OpenGL graphics system specification allows developers to incorporate a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects and other powerful visualization functions and provides a graphics pipeline that allows unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 3D and 2D graphics API. OpenGL is supported on all major computer platforms, including AIX(R), HP-UX(R), IRIX, Linux, Mac OS(R) X, Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000 and Windows(R) XP and Solaris. The OpenGL ARB governs the evolution and ongoing development of the OpenGL API. With broad industry support, OpenGL is the vendor-neutral, multiplatform graphics standard and is uniquely positioned to leverage the continuing improvements of graphics hardware.

NOTE: Silicon Graphics, SGI, the SGI logo, Onyx, OpenGL, and IRIX are registered trademarks and Onyx4, UltimateVision, OpenGL Vizserver and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft, Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. Mac OS is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACT

Ginny Babbitt

Ginnyb@sgi.com

+1-650-933-4519

SGI PR HOTLINE

+1-650-933-7777

SGI PR FACSIMILE

+1-650-933-0283

SGI

CONTACT: media, Ginny Babbitt, +1-650-933-4519, or Ginnyb@sgi.com; orSGI PR HOTLINE, +1-650-933-7777, or SGI PR FACSIMILE, +1-650-933-0283

Web site: http://www.sgi.com/

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