CEI's EnSight DR Brings Parallel Graphics to Desktops of High-End Visualization Users.APEX, N.C. -- EnSight DR is First Commercial Visualization Product to Harness Supercomputing-Like Graphics Power on Networked PC Clusters Next week at SC/05, the annual supercomputing show, CEI CEI Competitive Enterprise Institute CEI Conferenza Episcopale Italiana (Italian bishop conference) CEI Central European Initiative CEI Comitato Elettrotecnico Italiano (Italian Electrotechnical Committee) will introduce EnSight DR, the first commercial visualization application that brings the power of parallel graphics to the user's desktop. "Up until now, only expensive supercomputers have been able to efficiently render extremely large data sets," says Dale Southard, a visualization hardware architect at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: see Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (body) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - (LLNL) A research organaisatin operated by the University of California under a contract with the US Department of Energy. . Lawrence Livermore Lawrence Livermore may refer to:
NNSA National Nurses Society on Addictions NNSA Norfolk Naval Sailing Association NNSA Native Nations Sustainable Alliance (Phoenix, Arizona) ) Advanced Simulation and Computing Program The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (formerly called Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, or ASCI) is a supercomputing initiative of the United States government, created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 . "The availability of a commercial visualization application that harnesses off-the-shelf hardware for visualizing large scientific datasets containing tens of millions and even billions of polygons is critical to the success of our national security work," says Southard. CEI's EnSight DR uses distributed rendering (DR) technology that automatically distributes polygon data into pieces for balanced rendering on multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) running on networked PCs. Once images are rendered, EnSight DR composites the pieces into a single image. Large scenes, high frame rates EnSight DR expands on CEI's SoS (server of servers) capability in EnSight Gold software, used by leading automotive, aerospace and research labs worldwide to visualize some of the world's largest simulation problems. The new software provides a parallel, distributed rendering client that enables users to fully exploit the distributed memory (architecture) distributed memory - The kind of memory in a parallel processor where each processor has fast access to its own local memory and where to access another processor's memory it must send a message via the inter-processor network. Opposite: shared memory. capacity of networked PCs containing high-performance graphics cards. This gives users the ability to visualize the largest datasets on their desktops at interactive rates. EnSight DR also provides distributed, cluster-based rendering for planar multi-tile displays. EnSight DR includes new features for dataset decomposition and dynamic scene distribution to cluster nodes. These features, coupled with a scalable, high-performance image compositing engine and parallel-rendering control, enable EnSight DR to handle datasets and display sizes well beyond other commercial and even research applications. EnSight DR also supports Chromium-based parallel rendering Parallel rendering (or Distributed rendering) is a method used to improve the performance of computer graphics creation software. The rendering of graphics requires massive computational resources for complex objects like medical visualization, iso-surface generation, and , providing additional flexibility in cluster-computing environments. "The beauty of EnSight DR is that the distributed rendering is transparent to the user - that's a big leap forward," says Kent Misegades, CEI's president. "This is definitely a killer app A software application that is exceptionally useful or exciting. Killer apps are innovative and often represent the first of a new breed, and they are extremely successful. For example, in the late 1970s, the VisiCalc spreadsheet was the killer app for the Apple II, providing reason for those who want to leverage supercomputing-like graphics power on low-cost clusters." Scalability opens visualization frontiers EnSight DR's ability to maintain scalability over a high number of clustered GPUs is highly valued by leading hardware system vendors. "With EnSight DR, CEI has delivered a package that can take full advantage of HP's Scalable Visualization Array," says Winston Prather, vice president of high-performance computing High-speed computing, which typically refers to supercomputers used in scientific research. at HP. "EnSight DR accelerates rendering of the vast datasets produced by HP's XC cluster technology, giving users an unprecedented opportunity to visualize data in context." "EnSight DR truly leverages the capabilities found in our high-end visualization platform, which features the NVIDIA nForce Professional paired with NVIDIA Quadro The NVIDIA Quadro is a series of AGP and PCI Express graphics cards created by the NVIDIA Corporation. The cards are designed to accelerate CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and DCC (digital content creation) and are usually found in workstations. graphics," says Ian Williams, senior applied engineer at NVIDIA. "This combination delivers a new level of application performance on scalable clustered hardware systems." "EnSight DR coupled with a Linux Networx Supersystem enables customers to immediately focus on solving their most important visualization challenges," says Ben Passarelli, vice president of product marketing for Linux Networx. "Users will be able to see and understand engineering and scientific data in new ways while enjoying the systems experience of a Linux Networx Supersystem." CEI's full line of products for extreme visualization and meshing will be shown next week in Booth 1300 at SC/05. The company's products and applications will also be on display in the following booths: HP (#1608), Linux Networx (#1719), SGI (SGI, Sunnyvale, CA, www.sgi.com) A manufacturer of workstations and servers, founded in 1982 by Jim Clark. The company was founded as Silicon Graphics, Inc., but changed to its acronym in 1999. (#602), NASA NASA: see National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA in full National Aeronautics and Space Administration Independent U.S. (#1810), Los Alamos National Laboratory (#312) and IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) (#1510). About CEI CEI (www.ensight.com) offers a complete suite of tools for engineering and scientific visualization, from meshing to plotting to animations that can be run on the most advanced VR displays. The company has corporate headquarters in Apex, N.C., and authorized distributors around the world. In addition to software products, CEI provides consulting services to engineers and scientists from organizations that need to visualize computational results for research, product design or product refinement. Product and service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. |
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