Vendor Spotlight:

SGI SHOWCASES LATEST IN ADVANCED VISUALIZATION AT SIGGRAPH

Silicon Graphics, a global leader in high-performance computing, storage and advanced visualization showcased its highly acclaimed visualization technologies at this year's SIGGRAPH 2004 conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Attendees were able to view daily demonstrations in the following areas:

• Scalable Graphics: In SGI's scalable graphics theater there was ten to fifteen minute presentations illustrating the power of visualization with topics spanning scalability, flexibility, collaboration, and the importance of system architecture and key tools for visualization.
• Innovate and Discover: With SGI's APIs (Application Program Interface) developers learned how SGI software tools can help them innovate and discover scalable and cross-platform visualization applications, all of which convey the value SGI software creates for independent and in-house software developers.
• Visual Area Networking: VAN allows customers to accelerate their work processes by giving end users far greater visualization capabilities to universally store, access and share enormous and complex datasets with anyone, anywhere and at any time. VAN removes the requirement to have either the data or the advanced visualization capability local to the user and allows globally dispersed teams of people to visualize and interact with data in ways not previously possible.

SGI, with the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, announced the latest version of the OpenGL specification, incorporating support for OpenGL Shading Language. One of the most important and enduring standards in the computer industry, OpenGL 2.0 presents a revolution in graphics by providing high-level access to the programmable features of modern graphics processors and is an important step in creating photo-realistic, real-time 3D graphics.

In recent months, SGI has captured the world's imagination by taking scientists and the public at large on journeys to exotic locales ranging from outer space to ancient Egypt. For example, SGI technologies deployed at the Mars Center of the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., enabled visitors to take a virtual walk on Mars. This involved massive 3-D images being beamed back to Earth by the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers and then projected on a curved display measuring 14 feet tall and 36 feet wide.

In July, scientists at the British Museum in London used SGI technologies to peer inside the mummy of Nesperennub, an Egyptian priest who was laid to rest three millennia ago. Without disturbing a single thread of his funerary array, scientists discovered that the priest had suffered from a painful dental abscess and that undertakers had buried him with a bowl of tree sap stuck to the back of his head.

By delivering flexible and scalable solutions, creative, science and research communities alike can benefit from an open computing environment reiterating SGI's unwavering commitment to delivering high-quality tools to the media, manufacturing, sciences, energy and government and defense industries. Far beyond the ability of Personal Computers (PC) and PC clusters, SGI's visualization technologies are capable of handling large datasets and large numbers of pixels on a flexible, scalable architecture that utilizes multi- platform APIs.

Graphics Leadership

SGI offers competitive superiority by combining heritage in graphics technology with standards-based, off-the-shelf graphics processors in the following ways:

• Delivering more value through differentiation with a systems approach to design, by enabling remote visualization and collaboration and by delivering high-end capability to the desktop
• Driving industry-leading APIs into broader marketplace
• Offering advanced visualization technology that exceeds that of a PC under a unique range of capabilities:
  • Scalability -- able to scale to need the problem size
  • Flexibility -- able to adapt to meet the organizations' needs
  • Pervasiveness -- The more affordable price points of scalable graphics vs. previous system, but more importantly talk about solutions that work well with existing infrastructures.
  • Collaboration framework: the power of multi-disciplinary approaches to improve productivity
  • Interactivity -- performance of large datasets, data management

SGI: The Source of Innovation and Discovery

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's leader in high- performance computing, visualization, and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering, and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com.