Campus-wide roll-out of Avizo at Penn State

Visualization Sciences Group (VSG) has announced a campus-wide rollout of the Avizo 3D visualization software at Pennsylvania State University. The rollout leverages existing use by Penn State researchers in the Center for Quantitative X-Ray Imaging (CQI); the Department of Anthropology; The School of Forest Resources; and the Social, Life Science and Engineering Imaging Center (SLEIC), in order to provide broader interdisciplinary access to the visualization and analysis tools of the Avizo suite. Under the agreement, the entire Avizo product line has been made available for student and faculty users across the university, through a token-based licensing model. Any computer on the campus network can easily connect and run Avizo locally and access all of the functions available across the Avizo family of applications, using any supported platform.

“The campus-wide agreement allows us to build upon existing use of the Avizo suite in several research areas, in order to provide much wider access to these tools for the diverse range of research and teaching activities that are conducted across the university”, says Vijay K. Agarwala (Senior Director of Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure, ITS, Penn State). “The feedback we are getting from users has been very positive as all students, faculty and researchers now have ready access to state-of-the-art visualization and analysis tools provided by VSG”.

“The token-based license management model for Avizo software is an ideal solution for colleges, universities and government organizations as it meets the evolving and diverse needs of a broad range of users and applications”, explains Bill Henderson (VSG Academic and Government Manager). “Flexibility, ease of deployment and simple management are key aspects of this type of solution. Since the licenses are cross-platform, users aren’t restricted to a single operating system and are able to run Avizo on a system that they are already familiar with while still being able to share their data with colleagues running on different platforms”.