ModViz, Inc. announced today the general availability of its Virtual Graphics Platform (VGP) Release 1.0, a leading standards-based software solution that virtualizes 3D graphics intensive applications across clusters of commodity-based computers. VGP provides to customers, independent software vendors, cluster computing manufacturers and application developers a common OpenGL-based computing platform that delivers supercomputing level visualization with extreme data size and scalability on clusters of 3D graphics Linux computing nodes. A VGP cluster provides an extremely high-performance and scalable infrastructure that is significantly lower in cost than existing Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems and is easier to maintain or upgrade. VGP's independent rendering, composition and display clients enable customers to configure their computing cluster for optimal performance while maintaining complete display output flexibility. Through a common software layer that is transparent to existing applications, VGP allows designers, engineers, researchers and scientists to immediately achieve the tremendous benefits of commodity cluster computing with practically no change in their existing solution or workflow environment. "VGP 1.0 is designed to support a wide array of both commercial and non-commercial 3D visualization applications in fields such as seismic interpretation, computational fluid dynamics, digital mockup and bio-medical engineering. Its unique architecture allows existing applications to view a complete 3D graphics-enabled cluster as a single high-speed, parallel processing graphics card with very large memory and multiple display outputs," said Thomas Ruge, chief technology officer of ModViz. "Through a plug-in architecture, VGP can be highly optimized for any OpenGL-based application without modifying the original application's code." "We are pleased that VGP software is able to harness the power of the latest NVIDIA Quadro PCI Express professional graphics boards by virtualizing the graphics memory in computing clusters. This will provide customers access to unprecedented processing power when working with the most graphics intensive applications," said Jeff Brown, general manager of professional solutions at NVIDIA. "Interactive visualization of very large data sets is one of the most important requirements of HP's visualization customers today. ModViz's VGP and HP's powerful workstation lineup make a perfect combination for a visualization cluster solution," said Mark Ewers, worldwide visualization segment marketing manager, HP. "We are looking forward to providing customers with the ability to integrate Viz Cluster solutions."