Scientific
Applications:
SGI GAINS MOMENTUM FOR VISUAL AREA
NETWORKING
SGI announced recently that since it launched Visual Area Networking (VAN)
last year, the number of customers has grown to more than 110 installations in
research and industry. These customers are using VAN to accelerate their work
processes by giving end users far greater visualization capabilities and
multi-site collaboration. SGI also announced a more capable, lower-cost VAN
solution that will be attractive to smaller organizations.
In a separate release, SGI also announced the 100th VAN customer, the
Montreal
Neurological Institute (MNI). MNI is using VAN to provide interactive
visualization of large volumetric data sets to a worldwide computing grid for
brain-mapping scientists. Other recent VAN customers include Cambridge
University, Hokkaido University, MSX International, the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the University of Manchester and the University
of Technology Munich. NCAR, for instance, has installed VAN technology to
usher in the next generation of very-large-data exploration and collaborative
computing.
Solving the biggest problems requires the best minds, but increasingly,
people
are either mobile or working in remote locations, while advanced visualization
resources remain fixed. With SGI VAN, users can interact with visualization
supercomputers anywhere they are, with any client device-individually or as a
community of users. VAN removes the requirement to have either the data or the
advanced visualization capability local to the user. It allows globally
dispersed teams of people to visualize and interact with data in ways not
previously possible. The growing adoption of VAN reflects customer needs to
universally store, access and share enormous and complex datasets with anyone,
anywhere and at any time.
More Capabilities, Lower Cost
In related news, SGI announced new features that increase the capabilities
of
VAN and lower the cost. The new SGI Onyx 350 advanced visualization system and
OpenGL Vizserver 3.1 software deliver high-performance capabilities at half
the cost per user. This means that even small engineering departments can
manipulate high-resolution models and data sets previously only accessible
through a graphics supercomputer, enabling them to shorten product development
cycles.
A key breakthrough in OpenGL Vizserver 3.1 allows researchers in multiple
locations to manipulate and share control of visualization models. VAN now
delivers a greater degree of interactivity to all participants in a
visualization session. This type of workflow acceleration is only possible
when VAN solutions allow users to collaborate regardless of the location of
their data, computing and/or visualization resources.
"VAN technology is taking off," said Paul McNamara, senior vice president
and
general manager, Visual Systems Group, SGI. "Our customers are using VAN to
visualize enormous data sets generated on remote supercomputers making
advanced visualization readily available to distributed teams. Customers are
embracing visual Area Networking because it improves productivity and
workflow. No one else comes close to SGI in delivering the level of graphics
performance and capability of an Onyx graphics supercomputer over a standard
network. Today we are increasing the benefit to customers by providing a new
lower-cost host platform."
For additional information, visit www.sgi.com/visualization/van/
.
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