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SGI is pulling back the curtain on their latest hardware offering, the “Octane III”, taking them back to some of the names of yesteryear.
“Octane III makes supercomputing personal again,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. “Our customers have been asking for office environment products with large core counts that are easy to use and whisper-quiet. Octane III brings all of this to the HPC professional, and enables a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization.”
It currently comes in three configurations, available on their website.
The 10TY12 looks pretty nice to pack into a desktop system, but the rest are fairly underwhelming. Even the “Graphics Workstation” seems rather unimpressive by modern standards with 8 cores & 2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots that could come with pretty much any modern PC. Am I missing something?
Update: One interesting tidbit pointed out by an observant reader is that the press release indicates that you have the Xeon 3400 (Lynnfield) Processor as an option, however it’s nowhere to be found on the SGI builds or the PDF Datasheet they provide. I’m attempting to reach someone inside SGI for details on this.
Update #2: Over at InsideHPC, John West has more details about the system, such as:
- The 960GB of Memory is not shared (“it’s not a baby ultraviolet”), it’s 96G visible by each node, requiring you to have parallelized applications to use it.
- In the graphics configuration, it’s a classic vertically mounted motherboard so you get the 1 motherboard in the system, further adding to the “huh?” factor.
- He states that the Xeon 3400 configuration is for 40 cores per machine.
Update #3: Just heard back from SGI. The Xeon 3400 option isn’t actually available yet. It’s planned to be an option in the future, but currently your only options are the existing quad-core Xeon 5500′s or Atom’s.
via SGI Unveils Octane™ III Personal Supercomputer.
Hardware sgi
If you find yourself longing for the early days of Computer Generated Graphics in video, then head on over to the VintageCG Channel on youtube where they’ve amassed an impressive collection of CG films dating back to the early 80′s and before.
YouTube – VintageCG’s Channel.
Graphics animation, history, short, vfx
FieldView, the popular CFD simulation and visualization tool, has a new version out with some huge improvements in multi-core and parallel processing.
“We are seeing a huge productivity speedup from using FieldView Parallel 12.2,” Robinson continued. “Testing a typical 60M element file, going from our traditional single grid file to multi-grid and using 16 processors, we’ve cut the file read time from 5 minutes, 10 seconds to just 40 seconds – nearly eight times faster. Reading in large data can be incredibly time-consuming, and our large files sometimes exceed 200M elements. FieldView Parallel provides the solution at the very time we`re recognizing this growing problem.”
They give some anecdotal numbers of a 2x speedup on 4 cores, and a 5x speedup on 8 cores, making it not entirely linear but still a pretty impressive performance boost.
via Intelligent Light ReleasesFieldView 12.2 Exploiting Multi-Core Computing For Speed and Performance in CFD Post-Processing | Reuters.
Science cfd, fieldview, intelligent light, software
Kitware’s popular image processing companion to VTK, ITK, has just seen a new release (version 3.16) that offers some new features and important bugfixes.
The main changes in this release include the continued addition of classes for managing labeled images contributed on an Insight Journal article by G. Lehmann. These added classes were the remaining components of a 70+ class label map morphology module. These classes provide for the efficient representation of label maps and for conversion between current ITK label images and the efficient storage format.
You can see the full details on the ITK Wiki, and download ITK from here.
via Kitware – News.
Science itk, kitware, library, software
Something just occured to me and I hope the VizWorld audience is large enough to share some information with the rest of us. Do you own a Kindle or KindleDX? If so, then I’m curious: How do large infographics look on the Kindle?
If you have a kindle and some time, then fill us in. Hit any of the infographics on Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or GOOD magazine and take a pic of what it looks like on your Kindle. With the popular use of color to denote information, does the Kindle do a good job as processing it? Or does the entire image come through as a single large black block? Is the Kindle audience large enough to warrant a renaissance in black-and-white infographics?
Let us know, we can’t wait to hear from you!
Graphics, Hardware, Science epaper, feature, infographics, kindle
At the 9th International Symposium on Computer Methods in Biomechanics & Biomedical Engineering (in Valencia on 24-27 February, 2010) there will be a special session on “The Virtual physiological Human (GPH) project and Imaging in Biomechanics”.
This session will focus on patient-specific modeling and simulation of various body systems functioning in the framework of the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) calls of EU FP7 (http://vphop.eu/) and on image processing and analysis in biomechanics. Nowadays, multistage investigations aim at tackling time and length scales involved in the behaviour of biological and biomechanical systems (e.g., blood circulation, ventilation, digestion, renal purification, musculoskeletal apparatus, tumour growth, etc.) that sense, react, and adapt to environmental loadings, and in the study of that behavior from images.
Topics include (but not limited to) enhanced bio mathematical and biomechanical models, data mining and visualization, image segmentation, motion tracking, image alignment and registration, 3D reconstruction, medical imaging, applications of imaging processing and experiments for validation.
They are currently soliciting papers on these topics and. Abstracts must be in by October 16th. Full details are at the CMBBE2010 website.
Science biomed, conference
AMD has been hard at work trying to boost their “Stream” technology to somethign competitive with NVidia’s CUDA, and a new press release does a great job at cataloging the recent successes they’ve had.
- AMD was the first company to deliver a public beta release of an OpenCL software development platform for x86-based CPUs on August 5, 2009. The OpenCL for CPU implementation was certified conformant by Khronos on September 3, 2009.
- The complete ATI Stream SDK v2.0 for CPU and GPU software development using OpenCL is planned for full release later this year.
- To further meet the ATI Stream developer community’s needs, AMD has successfully completed the migration of its Brook+ project to SourceForge. SourceForge is a centralized online location for software developers to control and manage open source software, where the developer community can continue to work with and evolve the Brook+ code.
- AMD’s upcoming next generation ATI Radeon™ family of DirectX™ 11 enabled graphics processors are expected to be the first to support accelerated processing on the GPU through DirectCompute.
The real focus of the release is that they’ve submitted their OpenCL implementation to the Khronos Working Group for certification, which (if/once approved) will make AMD the only company to have a working CPU & GPU implementation of OpenCL.
via AMD Advances its Commitment to OpenCL™ for GPU With Review by Standards Body.
Hardware, Science amd, ati, gpgpu, stream
UniformChaos has build the STOC, Stock Ticker Orbital Comparison, which visualizes the stocks of the S&P500 as planets orbiting around the centerl S&P average.
STOC seeks to allow immediate comparison of hundreds or thousands of stocks, by mapping various stock-specific parameters to easily observable visual outputs, as one is able to immediately identify the largest, or reddest, or quickest item in the group. The data is mapped as follows: volume of trading = planet orbital distance; comparison to S&P 500 = planet speed; percent change from prior close = planet color; market capitalization = planet size; P/E ratio = planet atmosphere width and color; moving average = planet opacity; dividend yield = planet moon size. The large center circle, or sun, reprsents the average of all these numbers to define the general performance of the S&P 500.
You can download the visualization in Windows, Mac, & Linux versions. See a video of it after the break.
via STOC: NYSE Stock Exchange Planetary System – information aesthetics.
Read more…
Science interactive, stockmarket
Autodesk is now accepting submissions for the 2009 show reel to be aired during Autodesk University this December in Las Vegas.
The Design Show Reel 2009 will be showcased at AUTODESK UNIVERSITY from December 1-3, 2009, in Las Vegas. It will be featured during each sessions and to the opening of the Mainstage presentation.
We are also very interested in receiving high-resolution images – up to 300 dpi – for inclusion in our marketing material leading up to and surrounding the show. But again lower resolution is also most welcome.
Hit their website for full submission details. Submissions must be in by November 3rd.
via Autodesk – Design Visualization – AUTODESK UNIVERSITY 2009 Call for Submissions.
Graphics autodesk, contest
Preparations for SIGGRAPH2009 Asia are well underway, and Masa Inakage (the Chair of the Yokohama conference) sits down with CGSociety to talk about it.
The Japanese are the third largest contingent of SIGGRAPH attendees. First comes the Americans, then Canadians, then the Japanese. So the general CG community in Japan are well aware of the SIGGRAPH conference here in the US. Of course with the conference always (until now) being in the States, not every university could send their people. Now, this unique opportunity to have the SIGGRAPH over in Yokohama, I believe that there will be many, many Japanese people making their way to the local conference.
via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009 Diary.
Graphics, Science conference, interview, siggraph
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