SYSTEMS

Austin, Texas -- The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has established a relationship with Sun Microsystems to extend the process of scientific discovery through advanced visualization and grid technologies. Visualization is a vital part of the scientific discovery process, and TACC will work together with Sun to develop and provide solutions to address the growing need for visualizing terascale data sets. TACC will deploy a Sun Terascale Visualization System that combines Sun FireTM servers with large amounts of shared memory, next-generation graphics pipes and processors, and a high-speed interconnect. The Sun system will provide powerful analysis and rendering capabilities that are needed for current and future research applications. TACC research and development activities in visualization will target these new high-end systems, augmenting their capabilities for terascale data analysis. Furthermore, TACC and Sun will jointly develop grid technologies to enable interactive remote and collaborative visualization. “We are excited about this opportunity to team with Sun Microsystems. The Sun Terascale Visualization System will provide a powerful alternative to the commodity visualization clusters. There are multiple classes of algorithms that require large amounts of shared memory and a high-bandwidth interconnect, including perspective volume rendering and real-time ray tracing of unstructured terascale data sets, real-time terrain mapping, and computational steering of finite element applications. This collaboration will offer not only a world-class set of resources, but will allow TACC and Sun Microsystems to work together on research and development issues relevant to data intensive computing, grid computing, and scientific visualization,” said Kelly Gaither, Associate Director of TACC. The Sun Terascale Visualization will be fully deployed at TACC in the summer of 2004. Ultimately, the system will have more than half a terabyte of memory and a projected rendering capability of more than one billion polygons per second. A smaller initial system will be deployed in July 2003 in order to begin joint research and development activities in visualization and in grid computing, using SunTM ONE Grid Engine software. "The relationship between Texas Advanced Computing Center and Sun Microsystems will yield tremendous results in the areas of scientific visualization and grid computing," said Kim Jones, vice president of Global Education and Research for Sun Microsystems. "The Sun Fire servers combined with Sun's Grid Engine software provide a strong foundation for tremendous storage capability, powerful analytic data, and compelling visual information to address the most challenging problems that our nation's academic research community is tackling today."