ACADEMIA
SGI Unveils Visual Supercomputing Strategy
The SGI Visual Supercomputing strategy is built on a quarter-century of visualization leadership and a first-hand understanding of the challenges faced by HPC users in fields such as computer-aided engineering, advanced scientific research, physical and life sciences, product design and rendering. Many of these users seek visualization that is integrated within a solution that enables them to analyze, store and visualize their data. Today, however, existing solutions fail to address one or more aspects of that workflow. "Over the past few years, customers have asked SGI to provide visualization solutions that bridge the compute and data management stages of their HPC workflows, and with our new Visual Supercomputing strategy, we are doing that," said Bo Ewald, CEO, SGI. "Now, by combining our powerful compute platforms, data management solutions, industrial-strength Linux environment and carefully chosen third-party offerings, we can answer those needs. This strategy will deliver unified solutions to help organizations improve their productivity and maximize the returns on their IT investments." The new SGI Visual Supercomputing strategy is underpinned by a product roadmap that combines graphics processing unit (GPU) enhancements to existing SGI platforms, software-based visualization options, and integrated offerings from SGI Professional Services. The solutions will build on the compute capabilities of all SGI servers and clusters, from the shared-memory SGI Altix 4700 system to the new SGI Altix ICE integrated blade platform. In addition, SGI-developed and third-party software will enable remote visualization and other capabilities supported by SGI Visual Area Networking and Wide Area Visualization Environment solutions. The SGI Professional Services organization will provide integration and customization. Solutions from the SGI Visual Supercomputing portfolio will allow customers to rapidly process enormous amounts of data at very high levels of detail, interact with highly complex objects in real time, and distribute images remotely without the need to transfer large data sets across networks. "In the automotive styling field, the ability to visualize new designs with a high level of fidelity is absolutely essential," said Dave Nikel, digital model manager for the Hyundai Kia Technical Center in Irvine, Calif., which is running Opticore Opus Realizer on an SGI Altix XE1300 cluster with Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server. "Through the combination of Altix XE's considerable processing capacity and Opticore's powerful rendering software, we can cost-effectively generate interactive 3D models of new car styles, and change them on the fly. These capabilities can significantly reduce our time-to-solution, and that makes Hyundai more competitive." SGI Visual Supercomputing: Build, Simulate and Transmit SGI Visual Supercomputing solutions will enable customers to:
- Build large and complex data sets that are expanding in scope, precision and depth;
- Simulate and interact with those data sets to reduce the time it takes to reach a solution or breakthrough; and
- Transmit visual objects to allow remote users to view and interact with the data and further boost workgroup productivity.
"Today's HPC organizations are focused on enhancing productivity and improving optimization, signaling the emergence of a new market category for integrated solutions that leverage, rather than fight, this need," said Debra Goldfarb, CEO, Tabor Communications, Inc., a leading international media, research, market intelligence and communications company providing strategy, information and solutions for high-productivity communities. "More and more, customers will look for an HPC environment that provides real ease of use and truly integrated applications. The SGI strategy for Visual Supercomputing goes to the heart of these trends, and offers an opportunity for leadership in this emerging market category." SGI hybrid system architectures deliver the full breadth of technologies necessary to accommodate specific user workflows. The hybrid solutions enable the best use of varied SGI Visual Supercomputing technologies, while a range of tools, utilities and applications allow users to easily manage workloads within a unified Linux environment. Visual Supercomputing Demonstrations at SC07 In Booth 502 at SC07 this week, SGI will highlight the capability of its visualization solutions by demonstrating a selection of third-party software products. SGI will present a range of options, from software-only rendering and thin-client solutions incorporating the computational power of SGI clusters to a remote visualization system that makes use of GPU acceleration. Software-only rendering solutions running on SGI Altix XE systems include:
- Opticore Opus Realizer provides photorealistic real-time rendering, including high quality anti-aliasing and depth of field at interactive frame rates. This CPU-accelerated rendering software is multithreaded to take advantage of multi-core and multi-processor systems.
- EnsightDR from CEI provides post-processing using graphics clusters for distributed rendering. Ensight DR processes very large datasets and supports multi-tile displays and parallel compositing.
Remote visualization systems on display at SCO7 include:
- GO-Global from GraphOn is a server-centric solution providing cross-platform access to visualization applications from any platform or device. Using advanced, server-based technology and near-zero-footprint thin clients, users can run server-resident applications remotely from Windows, Linux, Mac or other client devices without modifying any code.
- ThinAnywhere from Mercury International Technology is a leading GPU-accelerated solution for securely visualizing high-end graphics across networks. ThinAnywhere Server enables the central deployment and management of graphics data and applications.
"For the past several years, SGI Professional Services has helped our customers create visualization environments based on our high-performance solutions," said Bob Pette, vice president, SGI Global Professional Services. "Now we're building on that history with a strategy to deliver a growing product line that incorporates our award-winning compute and storage solutions. We look forward to making additional announcements as those products come to market."