Ciprico Takes Part in Digital Galaxy Project at New Hayden Planetarium.Business Editors MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 6, 2000 Visualization System Delivers Stunning Virtual Reality Experience to Audience at American Museum of Natural History's new Rose Center for Earth and Space The Rose Center for Earth and Space is a notable part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The main entrance is located on the northern side of the museum on 81st Street near Central Park West. Ciprico Inc. (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on : CPCI See CompactPCI. ) announced that the new Hayden Planetarium's centerpiece Digital Dome Projection System in the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. is relying on a Ciprico high-performance Fibre Channel digital storage system to supply the imagery of literally billions of stars. The museum describes the Hayden's Digital Dome Projection System as the largest and most powerful virtual reality simulator in the world today. Dennis Pederson, Ciprico marketing manager noted, "We are excited about participating in this spectacular project. The system projects a high-definition 3D model of the Milky Way galaxy Milky Way Galaxy Large spiral galaxy (roughly 150,000 light-years in diameter) that contains Earth's solar system. It includes the multitude of stars whose light is seen as the Milky Way, the irregular luminous band that encircles the sky defining the plane of the galactic based on scientific data, including data from the Hubble Telescope See Hubble Space Telescope. and the European Space Agency European Space Agency (ESA), multinational agency dedicated to the promotion, for exclusively peaceful purposes, of cooperation among European states in space research and technology. (ESA 1. (architecture) ESA - Enterprise Systems Architecture. 2. (body) ESA - European Space Agency. ). Each viewer becomes a virtual space traveler throughout our galaxy." Trimension Systems Ltd. was the systems integrator for the Digital Dome which includes the computer system, display system and show control and automation technology. 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. provided the Onyx 2 supercomputer, related production computers, and critical technical advice throughout the project. The Museum Digital Dome effort is led by Aram Friedman, Director of Engineering for the Digital Dome and Benjy Bernhardt, Project Manager for Show Control, Automation and Sound. Aechelon Technology developed the image-generation software, C-Galaxy, which visualizes the AMNH AMNH American Museum of Natural History (New York City, NY) Digital Galaxy database that forms the basis of the virtual Milky Way galaxy. "The Digital Galaxy project team is staffed by an impressive team of astronomical artists, scientists, programmers, and designers ensuring that the visualization is as close as possible to the real thing," continued Pederson. "Audiences are treated to a truly awesome experience and we congratulate the entire team for their vision and determination to make it a reality." The Digital Dome Projection System is powered by a seven-pipe SGI Onyx The SGI Onyx is a series of visualisation systems designed and manufactured by SGI, introduced in 1993 and offered in two models, deskside and rackmount. The Onyx's basic system architecture is based on the SGI Challenge servers, but with the notable inclusion of graphics hardware. 2(TM) InfiniteReality2(TM) supercomputer with Aechelon playback display software. In the pre-production phase of the project, the Onyx2 manipulates massive scientific datasets of stars and nebulae. Once a scene is selected, it is rendered and composited as footage for the space show. The rendered digital movie frames are then stored on the Ciprico digital storage system for playback during the show. Audiences see a stunning mix of reality and scientific simulation of a three-dimensional virtual universe that re-creates a flight-path from Earth, to the Orion nebula, onward out of the Milky Way Galaxy, through our local group of galaxies, and even further to the Virgo Supercluster su·per·clus·ter n. A group of neighboring clusters of galaxies. supercluster A large group of neighboring clusters of galaxies, along with isolated galaxies scattered between them, the entire collection . At this point the show transitions from observed science data to a billion-point science simulation of a small portion of the observable universe. Twentieth-century planetariums have relied on static presentations with optical-mechanical projection systems. In contrast, the new twenty-first century Digital Dome Projection System displays a Digital Galaxy model generated with images from actual data sets. The results can be interactively controlled in real-time or in pre-rendered mode from a Ciprico digital storage system. "We needed nearly two terabytes of high-speed digital storage just to store the galactic imagery used in production for one space show," said Dennis Davidson, Project Manager for the Digital Galaxy Project. "The Ciprico disk arrays easily provided the capacity for our audiences to experience a story told with richly rendered imagery." Ciprico's 7000 Series Fibre Channel Disk Arrays are known throughout the visual imaging community for their full-speed Fibre Channel performance and ability to operate at the upper limits of their host interface. Multiple units can be striped together to deliver hundreds of megabytes per second (unit) megabytes per second - (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576). of sustainable bandwidth. The 7000's RAID technology assures no data loss and no performance degradation in the event of a drive failure so there is no interruption in real-time environments. The American Museum of Natural History American Museum of Natural History, incorporated in New York City in 1869 to promote the study of natural science and related subjects. Buildings on its present site were opened in 1877. has an informative website at www.amnh.org/rose/planetarium.html where visitors can take a virtual tour of the Hayden Planetarium and its futuristic new Rose Center for Earth and Space. The Rose Center opened on February 19th this year to large crowds and high praise. The Digital Galaxy Project, is a NASA-funded effort to map our knowledge of the Milky Way galaxy in 3D with the most current data sets. About Ciprico Ciprico designs, manufactures and markets high-performance, direct-attached and networked storage solutions, including intelligent hardware, software and professional services. Ciprico storage solutions are designed for visual computing applications ranging from high-speed data capture, through processing and analysis, to real-time playback at sustained performance levels. Ciprico is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. More information about Ciprico is available on the World Wide Web at www.ciprico.com. Copyright (c) 2000 Ciprico - All Rights Reserved. Ciprico is a registered trademark of Ciprico Inc. Product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. |
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