Senior U.S. Navy and government officials recently opened the Navy's new Center for Concept Visualization (CCV), a ship system analysis and design facility at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division in Bethesda, MD. For the Center's core visualization technology the Navy chose a new SGI(R) Onyx(R) 3800 visualization system with InfinitePerformance(TM) graphics. The CCV is used by teams of Navy scientists, engineers, designers, and decision makers to view, test and manipulate highly "immersive" visualizations of new ship designs, reducing the time and cost of building new ships while stress testing designs for particular sea and battle conditions. Located within the Navy's Hydrodynamic/Hydroacoustic Technology Center (H/HTC), the CCV supports design of a wide array of new Navy ships and ship systems, ranging from the largest aircraft carriers to small, unmanned submarines. SGI(R) technology enables design teams of naval officers, scientists, engineers and managers to collaborate in immersive real-time environments. These environments include virtual views of complex physical phenomena and data in three dimensions that can be viewed and manipulated from any angle. "With the SGI Onyx 3800 and InfinitePerformance graphics technology, the CCV represents an important advance in Navy ship design technology, and right now we are handling more new designs than ever before," said Doug Dahmer, H/HTC operations manager. "Navy ship design is changing with the times, and the Center is instrumental in enabling the development of a generation of ships and submarines able to meet new missions and new strategic military needs. We are producing more detailed, more realistic and more illuminating views of ships earlier in the design process than ever before." The CCV performs demanding tasks such as hydrodynamic and hydroacoustic volumetric visualization. This type of visualization allows engineers to examine in extreme detail, water flow and noise transmission in and around ships and submarines. It allows prediction of ship maneuvering characteristics, top speed and counter detection ranges. Modeling many different hull form configurations focuses design efforts before expensive model testing or even more expensive full-scale trials. The results are faster quieter, more innovative ships that cost our taxpayers less money. The center's Onyx 3800 with InfinitePerformance graphics is configured with six graphics pipes, which are then combined to drive three displays using three high-end Christie Mirage 2000 projectors. The end result is a 21-foot wide active stereo VR image with a resolution of 3328x1024. The Onyx 3800 system provides more than just fast geometry processing and high-resolution displays. Its seven giga-bytes of shared main memory and 28 processors give it the computational horsepower to generate meaningful content. Besides the three VR projectors the CCV is also equipped with three utility projectors allowing a wide variety of presentation applications, including video-, audio- and data conferencing. The CCV is the culmination of a two-year effort by the H/HTC staff, sponsors, SGI and FakeSpace Systems. "SGI is proud to support advanced ship system design for the Navy," said Tony Celeste, national director of defense and intelligence business, SGI. "Our Onyx 3800 and InfinitePerformance graphics represents four product generations of visualization advancement. It enables users to view bigger visualization problems, and the challenges the Navy has in store for our technology are highly complicated. SGI was the logical choice for the Navy."