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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - General:
SGI VAN Helps WestGrid Achieve Better Results
Silicon Graphics 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 Onyx4
UltimateVision systems using OpenGL Vizserver 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 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 for the Visual Systems
Group at 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 or Linux
operating system, Sun Solaris and IRIX 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 www.sgi.com .
About SGI
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics Inc, is in the business of
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 www.sgi.com .
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