VISUALIZATION

Solaris 10 OS Powers Scalable, Sharable System, Enabling a 'Virtual' Visualization Environment: Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of the Sun Visualization System, an end-to-end solution that integrates workstations, servers, networking, interconnects, graphics and software -- including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system on the planet -- to deliver advanced 3D visualization on a variety of devices. The Sun Visualization System can help organizations and researchers in High Performance Computing (HPC) fields visualize and solve some of the world's most complex problems, improve analytical ability and innovation, heighten productivity, and speed time to market for complex designs. Based on high-performance Sun Fire servers, high-speed/low-latency interconnects and industry-leading graphics solutions, the Sun Visualization System delivers scalable, sharable and affordable multi-display and remote collaboration visualization solutions that can be integrated into companies' existing IT infrastructure. When built by Sun's Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program, these solutions can help eliminate the complexity and risk usually associated with designing and deploying visualization technology. "Visualization technology is always in high demand for many applications in the manufacturing, oil/gas, life sciences, scientific research and defense industries. Yet many organizations are feeling constrained by the lack of affordable access to high-performance visualization environments and display technology," said Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and Integrated Systems, Sun Microsystems. "Taking advantage of the constant increases in network bandwidth, Sun is able to offer both scalable and sharable visualization systems that are delivered configured and ready to run." The Sun Visualization System "virtualizes" visualization by treating the graphics hardware resources as a resource pool and dynamically assigning them to either sharing or scaling, or both. The Sun Visualization System takes advantage of the increased compute power and memory of Sun Fire servers to deliver a robust yet affordable graphical visualization solution that is scalable and shareable, enabling even remote collaboration. A complete visualization solution includes: *Sun Fire server(s) and/or Sun Ultra Workstation(s) powered by UltraSPARC or AMD Opteron processors *Sun XVR-2500, NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics or NVIDIA Quadro Plex Visual Computing System *Sun Shared Visualization Software *Sun Scalable Visualization Software Customers such as the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Surrey and others have already deployed elements of the Sun Visualization System to help them collaborate on complex medical research and scientific projects such as nanotechnology, weather prediction, and research on genetic diseases. Customer quotes and more details on customer deployments can be found at: its Web site Availability and Pricing Multiple configurations of the Sun Visualization System are available. An entry-level system, including Sun Scalable Visualization and Sun Shared Visualization software, that supports up to four displays and four remote clients simultaneously, is available now in the United States with pricing starting at $17,230. Available separately, the Sun Shared Visualization software can be downloaded and used at no cost, with support available for purchase. For more information on the Sun Visualization System, please visit: its Web site.