ENGINEERING

Since its release, the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system has been eagerly adopted by leaders in technical and scientific visualization, and is rapidly becoming the gold standard of 64-bit Linux visualization environments. Widespread acceptance by the manufacturing, sciences, energy, and government and defense industries has set the stage for existing SGI application developer-partners and a broad range of applications brand new to SGI to optimize their industry-leading software for the open-systems, large memory, scalable Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system. The growing momentum to port visualization applications to Silicon Graphics Prism systems is fueled by the fact that more than 250 computational applications previously optimized for 64-bit SGI Altix high-performance compute systems will also run on Silicon Graphics Prism. Any industry needing to combine computational applications with visualization (which is just about everyone) can now do both on one Silicon Graphics Prism. For example: in structural analysis, engineers can run simulations with MSC.NASTRAN and ANSYS and use the same Silicon Graphics Prism system to visualize their results using CEI EnSight Gold. The combination of computing and visualization applications on the same scalable system increases individual productivity and the results achievable from a single system. "An impressive number of industry-leading software application developers are seeing the value that scalable visualization using large memory has in their market segments and are quickly making their scalable visual applications available for 64-bit Silicon Graphics Prism systems. They are able to do this rapidly and easily because of the SGI open systems environment," said Anneke Dempsey, senior director, Global Alliances, SGI. "With the broad adoption by developers of the Silicon Graphics Prism system, SGI now offers a phenomenal solution that allows high-performance computational as well as incredibly precise visualization capabilities on a single platform, for a huge variety of industries." Among the software development partners porting their applications to the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system are: Advanced Visual Systems' (AVS) popular AVS/Express software is used to extract new meaning from the visualization of all types of large and complex datasets in the fields of science, engineering and academia. A recently released 64-bit Linux operating environment version, AVS/Express 7.0, will find greatly increased rendering and application performance on Silicon Graphics Prism systems. AVS5, for the developer who builds custom 2D imaging and 3D interactive rendering and volume visualization applications, has also been certified for Silicon Graphics Prism system. The performance of both AVS/Express 7.0 and AVS5 embrace the power and bandwidth of the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system, which provides greatly detailed insight into massive datasets. Computational Engineering International (CEI) released the latest version of EnSight Gold 8.0 MCAE (mechanical computer aided engineering) software for analyzing, visualizing and communicating high-end scientific and engineering datasets. Used widely in structural manufacturing around the world, CEI EnSight on the Silicon Graphics Prism platform delivers true 64-bit computing for the world's most demanding problems. Researchers can load complete data sets into the Silicon Graphics Prism system, and achieve new levels of interactivity, real-time collaboration, and performance now required for visualizing the high-resolution, large-scale simulations used for crash testing, air flow and other computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) research and design components. de pinxi SA has just released its ARGO toolkit package, ARGO 6.5, on the Silicon Graphics Prism platform. de pinxi is particularly well-known for its numerous theme parks and museum productions such as Kegopolis, and Voyage in the Human Body, which are currently powered by SGI Reality Center systems for interactive, real-time computer graphics. The software and electronics developed by de pinxi allow the mixing of videos and animations, still images, spatial sounds, automation and piloting of special effects and mechanical systems. de pinxi's port to the Silicon Graphics Prism architecture is testimony to the unbeatable combination of price-performance delivered by the IA-64 Linux environment and unprecedented visualization detail delivered by the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system. To greatly increase the accuracy of geoscientists' drilling decisions, Earth Decision Sciences will deliver superior visualization power to its Earth Decision Suite of modeling, visualization and seismic interpretation software products by offering its integrated approach to uncertainty management on Silicon Graphics Prism solutions. Powered by GOCAD, the entire Earth Decision Suite demands the high-performance computation and powerfully accurate visualization of the 64-bit SGI large memory architecture. For its customers around the globe, Earth Decision Suite on the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system will enable realistic perception and analysis of immense energy-exploration datasets leading to deeper considerations of all aspects of risk, which directly impacts drilling decisions and results in tremendous cost savings. ESI Group's PAM-FLOW, an advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software product used to simulate unsteady flow phenomena present in a wide variety of industrial and research applications, will soon be available for Silicon Graphics Prism systems. PAM-FLOW has applicability in many industries, including automotive and other ground transportation, rotating machinery, heavy machinery, aerospace and biomedical. PAM-FLOW, part of the virtual-try-out-space (VTOS) solution from ESI, is greatly enhanced by the Silicon Graphics Prism system because it combines computation and visualization to accelerate workflow and increase productivity. GeoFusion's GeoMatrix Toolkit is a state-of-the-art system for building interactive, 3D visualization applications for viewing earth and/or other planetary data. The GeoMatrix system is being used for GIS (Geographic Information System), defense, scientific, education, entertainment, and consumer applications. The GeoMatrix System is used to pre-process, and then access in real-time, arbitrary amounts of geo-specific data in 3D, including virtually unlimited amounts of imagery, terrain, vector, and annotation data with resolutions ranging from outer space to street level. The GeoMatrix Toolkit SDK is now available on Silicon Graphics Prism systems and supports multi-pipe configurations. The Toolkit provides an application programming interface (API) to low-level and applications-support libraries, example applications, and documentation, enabling software engineers to quickly build high-performance interactive digital earth-based applications. To break through the bottlenecks of large data sets and deliver sustained, high-speed performance for fluid dynamics analysis, Intelligent Light—makers of FIELDVIEW, the aerospace, automotive and general manufacturing industries' most widely used CFD post-processing software—has ported its software to the Silicon Graphics Prism solution. The high-bandwidth architecture of Silicon Graphics Prism will enable FIELDVIEW customers to compute and visualize data sets that are much larger than anything they could visualize through a PC or through a cluster. The higher data rates support greater interactivity even with these larger models, resulting in greatly improved productivity. Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC) is optimizing LS-PrePost, used primarily for impact and crash simulation, for 64-bit Prism technology. Currently available in UNIX, Windows and Linux utilizing the OpenGL graphics standard to achieve fast rendering and XY plotting. LS-PrePost (which is delivered with LSTC's LS-DYNA software) is an advanced interactive program for preparing input data for LS-DYNA, and processing the results from LS-DYNA analyses. Used widely by leaders in the aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing industries with significantly large datasets, LS-DYNA is a general-purpose transient dynamic finite element program capable of simulating complex real world problems. The combination of the Silicon Graphics Prism system's computational power, scalability and visualization capabilities and LS-PrePost will deliver a high-performance, yet cost-effective platform for computer-aided engineering (CAE) users and collaborative teams. The Mecalog Group is offering M-CRASH for Silicon Graphics Prism systems. M-CRASH is a pre-processor for Mecalog's RADIOSS software suite that reduces model-building time for a complete RADIOSS CRASH simulation. M-CRASH is used by leading automobile manufacturers for analysis and design of structural mechanics, safety with M-SAFETY including, optimization with M-OPT including and exploration with M-XPLORE including. M-CRASH data preparation will be greatly accelerated through by the global shared memory architecture of the Silicon Graphics Prism system, which provides direct access to all the data and offers many times the visualization capability of any other computing system available. Both amira and Open Inventor from Mercury Computer Systems can take full advantage of the versatility of Silicon Graphics Prism systems to drive small team rooms and immersive environments which is big news for the energy, MCAE and academic research markets. By taking full advantage of the Silicon Graphics Prism system's multiple graphics pipes, Mercury products offer users the ability to drive multiple displays or support two users simultaneously. The combination of Mercury's visualization products coupled with the Silicon Graphics Prism system also allows for the support of multiple shared resources for more effective collaboration. The Pixel Farm has announced PFPlay 4K for the Silicon Graphics Prism platform providing those needing to review image sequences at high resolution the ability to playback uncompressed 4K images from disc in real-time. PFPlay running on the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system is an ideal and cost-effective tool for the production of digital dailies for review and approval in feature film production as well as providing a quality assurance tool prior to running out to film. Directors and producers can now screen up to the minute versions of their productions at a resolution that allows any problems to be quickly identified using display technology such as the new Sony SXRD 4K projector. The unique architecture of the Silicon Graphics Prism platform will allow even greater resolutions to be achieved when required. To help engineers break through technical barriers that have kept them from realizing the full potential of their data, Tecplot, Inc. has released a version of its flagship data visualization product, Tecplot that takes advantage of the Silicon Graphics Prism systems. Tecplot is a visualization program used by tens of thousands of engineers and scientists to analyze, explore and understand complex data and relationships. Plots and animations created in Tecplot enable users to visualize and communicate information clearly, concisely, and effectively in ways that text and numbers cannot. The combination of Silicon Graphics Prism solution with Tecplot visualization software greatly enhances the ability of scientists and engineers to uncover details hidden in large data sets and solve previously unsolved problems. TTF specializes in interoperability between CAD systems and Multi-CAD Digital Mockup for automotive, aerospace, and consumer goods industries. TTF Translators, now available on Silicon Graphics Prism systems, enable CAD software interoperability for all leading CAD software including CATIA, ProEngineer, IDEAS, Solidworks, etc. The unprecedented compute performance of Silicon Graphics Prism systems for high speed I/O coupled with the open Linux operating environment will power TTF Translators at never before seen speeds, resulting in improved time to market and significant productivity gains. VRCO CAVELib is a powerful application programmer interface (API) that provides the cornerstone for creating robust interactive three-dimensional (i3D) environments. Some of the items CAVELib abstracts away for a developer are, window and viewport creation, viewer-centered perspective calculations, displaying to multiple graphics channels, multi-processing or multi-threading, and stereoscopic viewing. The Silicon Graphics Prism system's use of Linux and the innovative SGI NUMA architecture provides customers the best of both worlds—a widely used and adopted operating system, and a technology proven to simplify the creation of highly-scalable multiprocessor and multi-pipe applications. The NUMA architecture lowers the hurdles and removes the complexity of inter-processor communication typically required in a cluster application. CAVELib and the Silicon Graphics Prism platform make it extremely easy for developers to transition i3D visualization applications from other Linux clusters or multi-pipe IRIX systems. The Silicon Graphics Prism platform also provides a stable base for software vendors like VRCO to create new applications that are highly scalable, both computationally and graphically. VRcontext provides the Energy, Aerospace, and Homeland Security and Defense markets with real-time visualization technology. The company aims at delivering the highest level of quality, integrated solutions and service for real time visualization. VRcontext works with many industry-leading technology partners to deliver fully integrated solutions to customers. VRcontext's flagship product Walkinside™ is instantly able to render very large, complex 3D models, allowing the users to immediately and effortlessly explore the virtually replica of the environment. The virtual models are used for project engineering lifecycle management, scenario and simulation exercises in VR centers and safety and security training. Walkinside for Silicon Graphics systems will speed rendering of complex 3D models, fluidly visualize the data, and allow key decision makers, engineers and designers to gain the insights that lead to improved project workflows and the winning competitive edge. VSP Technology provides the manufacturing industry, 3D entertainment companies and oil and gas markets with interactive software tools for preparation, handling, optimization and 3D real-time visualization, in virtual reality environments, of 3D complex digital prototypes. Presented in the form of a C++ software components library, VSP's X-Mesh allows any modeling software to use the most recent algorithms and thus benefit from improved flexibility, malleability and performance during the internal management of meshes. Soon to be available for the 64-bit Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system—which will superbly increase performance and fidelity—X-Mesh facilitate the transformation, reparation and optimization of meshes in order to use them for simulations or in preparation for visualization.