SYSTEMS

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. announced the introduction of its cluster edition for Open Inventor from Mercury at the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) Conference and Exhibition. The Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition is a technology breakthrough that enables application developers to overcome limitations of display hardware cost effectively. This optimized software solution enables transparent scalability of Open Inventor from Mercury and VolumeViz LDM (large data management) for increased resolution, quality, and performance in applications that display large volumes of data. These applications, which include oil exploration and production, and scientific 3D visualization, are typically run on high- performance visualization computer systems with multiple Internet-networked graphics machines, also called graphics clusters. "A key advantage of our Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition is the ability to manage and dynamically analyze massive volumes of data, and propose 3D representations that are appropriate to the geophysics people," said Jean Bernard Cazeaux, vice president of Geosciences and 3DViz Technology, Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. "Data sets can be extremely large and complex, such as when derived from seismic acquisition, making the interpretation of results all the more challenging." The Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition also offers users great flexibility to interactively navigate within several hundred gigabytes of volume data. From data analysis and interpretation to decision making, this powerful technology can dramatically impact collaboration workflow in geosciences, material sciences analysis, product design and simulation, visual simulation and much more. The Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition and VolumeViz LDM offer the most consistent coverage of high-performance visualization platforms including graphics clusters, multi-pipe SMP machines, and video compositing systems. "I believe the combination of our software cluster technology with high- end visualization systems significantly accelerates the decision-making process," Mr. Cazeaux added. Based on a distributed scene graph, the Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition allows an application to run unchanged on a master computer, with its scene graph optimally distributed to slave cluster nodes. It manages the parallelized rendering of portions of the total image to calculate and display. Leveraging its out-of-core capabilities, VolumeViz LDM transforms Open Inventor from Mercury into an optimal middleware for the management and visualization of very large volume data. The high level of data synchronization, caching, and management enable Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition to provide unparalleled transparency for the best possible load balancing and scalability with any available combination of CPU, GPU, channels, memory, storage, and network resources. It is designed for seamless adaptation to legacy Open Inventor from Mercury and/or VolumeViz LDM applications; no additional effort is required for user interface integration deployment on arbitrary configurations. The Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition and VolumeViz LDM are available on Linux systems, including AMD Opteron64, and Intel Xeon EMT64. Mercury plans to release the Windows version for both 32- and 64-bit architecture during the last quarter of calendar year 2005. Mercury will demonstrate the Open Inventor from Mercury Cluster Edition at its EAGE booth and at the American Association of Petroleum Geologist (AAPG) Conferences in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June 19-23. All demonstrations will include large seismic and reservoir data on a 12-screen high resolution display (approximately 16 million pixels) driven by a compact/high-density visualization cluster from Mercury.