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SGI LAUNCHES A NEW ERA FOR GRAPHICS

SGI announced a vision and four products for a new concept in advanced visualization called Visual Area Networking. The vision is to enable universal access to advanced visualization using any computing device, over standard networks. The new products include graphics infrastructure software, graphics hardware and desktop systems that make this vision a reality. The new software, OpenGL Vizserver 2.0, will allow users to interact with visualization supercomputers individually or as a collaborative community of users, from anywhere in the world. It allows globally dispersed teams to visualize and interact with data in ways never previously possible.

"Every three years or so SGI fundamentally changes the world of computer graphics," said Bob Bishop, chairman and chief executive officer of SGI. "It started with our introduction of the first 3D graphics terminal using a geometry engine in 1982. Now at our 20th anniversary, that time has come again. Visual Area Networking has the power to democratize access to powerful visualized supercomputer data that up until this point has been accessible only to those who could afford large visualization systems."

Solving the most challenging problems in science and industry requires the best minds and the most sophisticated computing resources. Increasingly, people are globally mobile or in locations remote from an organization's advanced computing resources. Today, scientists and engineers log onto a central computer to get data via a high-performance network. However, the data, sometimes as large as a terabyte, must then be transferred across the network so users can interact with it. To store, access, process and visualize this complex data, users must have very powerful computer systems at their remote locations.

The concept of Visual Area Networking means that the data is stored and processed in one place but can be interacted with by users across existing networks, using any client device, from tablets and laptops to large SGI Reality Center facilities. It removes the requirement to have either the data or the advanced visualization capability local to the user or to have enhanced, ultrahigh bandwidth networking resources connecting the remote and the centralized locations.

"With this vision, we are responding to the needs of technical and creative customers in several markets. They have a globally dispersed work process and don't want to duplicate the advanced computing resources in every location their people are. They have the need, at times, to call in experts to collaborate on a single data set in an instant," Bishop said. "The power of SGI visualization supercomputers is literally put into the hands of people like surgeons performing virtual surgeries on the battlefield or geologists analyzing strata in the Gulf of Mexico."

Visualization Anywhere -- A Change in Philosophy about Graphics Innovation

The concept of a Visual Area Network represents a shift from focusing only on advancing pure rendering power to include consideration of the location and availability of visualized data sets across the network. This is called visual serving, a concept that was pioneered by SGI. Visual Area Networking makes rendered data available to the user by sending only the pixels of the visualized graphic rather than the raw data, to be visualized locally. As such, it increases security by not allowing duplicates of the data to be distributed throughout the network.

Visual Area Networking works with applications based on the OpenGL API, including existing packages from software vendors and customer proprietary software, with zero modification. It works with existing and future network infrastructures. It is client independent, including small devices such as tablets and, someday, PDAs, through large-scale SGI Reality Center facilities. It allows shared application control between all participants in a session.

"Visual Area Networking will drive new applications and workloads around collaborative research in areas ranging from engineering and life sciences to financial modeling," said Debra Goldfarb, group vice president of enterprise systems, IDC. "We believe this will expand SGI's market opportunities both vertically and horizontally due to the overall performance and price/performance advantages it delivers."

Visual Area Networking is driven by two core technologies developed by SGI: the SGI Onyx 3000 series of visualization systems and OpenGL Vizserver 2.0.

Scalable SGI Onyx 3000 series visualization systems with SGI NUMAflex modular computing technology generate complex 3D graphics, rich 2D imagery and superior high-resolution video for the world's fastest, most realistic visualization. The SGI NUMAflex modular system allows users to build the right system for their needs, one "brick" at a time. OpenGL Vizserver 2.0 software enables a single SGI Onyx 3000 series computer to distribute visualization sessions to virtually any kind of client. The rendering, compute and I/O power of the SGI Onyx 3000 series systems is made available on any end-user client device, whether a laptop, PC, workstation, wireless tablet device and in the future, PDAs.

Advanced Collaboration across the Visual Network

Separate groups within an organization often do not interact with one another but rather work with their own chunks of data and then pass these around the organization, in a sequential fashion. Changes made on one aspect of the product can have dramatic effects on the work that other areas of the organization, such as the different components of automobile design teams, have done. For example, if an engineer sitting at a PC in Detroit makes a change to an automobile body design, the engine designer in Germany can view that alteration on an SGI system and determine how the change affects the fuel efficiency. At the same time a safety expert in Tokyo could recognize a potential conflict between vehicle weight restrictions and the new design change, allowing her to address the conflict on her laptop while touring the factory.

Other potential industry implementations of Visual Area Networking include:

Energy -- A worker on an oil rig off the California coast could have direct access to an SGI Onyx 3000 series system in her company's Houston office using her PDA with a wireless connection.

Medical -- A surgeon could safely use a desktop in a sterile operating room to see and manipulate a medical scan using 3D rendering on an Onyx 3000 series system located in the basement of the hospital.

Sciences -- An astronomer in Arizona could process and view data about a pending discovery being gathered by a telescope at night in Australia while continuing his work during daylight hours, collaborating with another astronomer in North Africa.

Defense -- An army sergeant could use his wireless tablet PC to view pure, photographic detail of enemies over a hill in front of him via data taken by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and processed by an Onyx family system on the fly back at the command post.

"The eye is the highest bandwidth input system for the brain," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer, SGI. "If raw data can be processed into visual graphics faster, then made more readily available anywhere and on any device, we would have increased the power of comprehension and insight via immediate universal access."

About SGI

Celebrating its 20th year, SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, is a leading provider of high-performance computing, complex data management and visualization products, services and solutions that enable its technical and creative customers to gain strategic and competitive advantages in their core businesses. Whether being used to design and build safer cars and airplanes, discover new medications and oil reserves, predict the weather, entertain us with thrilling movie special effects or provide mission-critical support for government and defense, SGI systems and expertise are empowering a world of innovation and discovery. The company, located on the Web at www.sgi.com, is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and has offices worldwide.