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The rules have been set for this year’s SuperComputing Student Cluster competition, and this year it’s all about “Go Green”.

This year’s SC09 Student Cluster Competition is built around a “Go Green!” theme, tying it in with this year’s show. Just like the previous competition, this year’s rules have capped the overall power requirements of each team’s gear to a pair of 120-volt, 20-amp circuits. Each circuit will have a soft limit of 13 amps. Penalties will be assessed if a respective team trips an alarm on the metered power circuits. Each team’s hardware, along with the metered power units, must fit into a single rack.

The teams & vendors have been set and work is underway.  The benchmarks consist of the usual simulation codes, but a great addition this year is VisIt.  I don’t see any details yet on what they’ll need to do inside of VisIt, but the fact that is made it into the application run category is a huge win for both the developers of VisIt and visualization scientists everywhere.

via SC09 Student Cluster Competition: Go Green! | insideHPC.com.

Science conference, contest, sc09, visit

Over on YouTube is a video showing a new Maya deformer called “fStretch” that offers real-time interactive manipulation and recomputation of surfaces.

fStretch is a new maya deformer that let one create astonishing stretch and squash setup very easily. All the resulted deformations are then sculptable and fast. The plugin can also be used for creating believable wrinkles. The algorythm (sic) is fast and can be used on heavy meshes without major slowdown. The plugin will run realtime on a reasonable mesh. With fStretch, you can now setup awesome facials rigs easier than never before! A setup that can take you days to make will now be created much faster and have better deformations.

The video points to www.cgaddict.com for more information, but there isn’t anything there yet.  Hopefully some more info will come out soon!  See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics fstretch, maya, plugin, software

The commercial for the new Porsche Panamera, Porsche’s first 4-seat sports car, shows the entire family of Porsche sportscars traveling through the desert, resulting in a collection of tread marks that showcase the iconic automaker’s “family tree”.  The video was made by Asylum and presented a host of challenges as each car was individually roto’ed to remove the dust and tracks, so that they could be recreated in CG to give the appropriate results.

A realistic-looking desert plain, with tracks and dust trails from the speeding cars, had to be created in CG for the 50 live-action cars to live in. All the environments, tracks, dust and previs dynamics were done in Houdini for its scalability and procedural capabilities. Houdini’s Digital Assets allowed Asylum to modify the look of the terrain, tracks and dust in a single shot, quickly propagate the changes to all shots and handle pre-composites of certain elements prior to handing them off for compositing.

via Asylum Helps Draw The Porsche Family Tree | CGnews.

Graphics asylum, car, commercial, porsche, vfx

Lockheed Martin has just announced a new service aimed at delivering sophisticated mapping and imagery tools to U.S. Government agencies.  Collaborating with Pictometry International, Corp. they’ve developed a web-portal called “Intelligence on Demand”  that offers a pay-as-you-go web-access to over 100 million high-resolution images.

Dozens of U.S. government agencies rely on sophisticated mapping and imagery to support their operations. But for many of the organizations within these agencies, it’s not practical to purchase and maintain a multi-million dollar server infrastructure to house terabytes of high-resolution imagery.

For organizations looking for affordable, instant access to imagery, Lockheed Martin offers Intelligence on Demand, a new web portal developed in collaboration with Pictometry International, Corp. that delivers a complete library of imagery and analytical tools for a flat monthly subscription fee.

via Intelligence on Demand | Lockheed Martin. via Reuters Press Release

Science gis, government, lockheed martin, map, satellite

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Me, I’m sticking with my iPhone.

Total Cost of Ownership: Motorola Droid vs iPhone 3GS vs Palm Pre vs MyTouch 3G.

Graphics, Hardware infographic, mobile, tco

I was checking the weather today, a decided rainy day, and saw that Weather Underground now has a “3d Weather Radar” Feature.  The overlay the existing 2D terrain & radar map with a 3d isosurface extracted from the data.

• The 3D interface shows 3 iso-surfaces of radar dBZ (3D surfaces of equal radar echo/precipitation strength). These surfaces are 20 (green), 30 (yellow), and 50 (red) dBZ.
• A standard 2D radar image covers the ground.
• USGS terrain is drawn at 30 arc-second resolution to show topography
• Place names are drawn in white text
• Counties are drawn as black lines

It’s powered by the Unity player. It’s still very basic, and not worth much more than fun factor at the moment.  What else could they add that would make it more valuable?

via 3D Radar : Weather Underground.

Science 3d, interactive, unity, unity3d, weather, web

VRay users need to head on over to the Chaos Group download area and pick up the new VRay 1.5 SP4 which includes their new V-Ray Ambient Light system.  In addition, they’ve added a few other bells and whistles:

• Improved multithreading on multi-core machines;
• Ability to specify gizmo falloff for VRayEnvironmentFog;
• Ability to use arbitrary meshes as gizmos for VRayEnvironmentFog;
• Option to exclude the background from VRayEnvironmentFog;
• Added CIE sky models to the VRaySun and VRaySky;
• It is now possible to submit DR servers list for DR through backburner;
• Added option to not use area speculars in the VRayIES light;
• Added Kelvin temperature settings for the color of VRayLights;
• VFB history is now turned off when 3ds Max is in slave mode;
• Output .vrimg and split channel paths are listed in the Asset Tracker;
• GI cache files (irradiance maps, light cache etc) are listed in the Asset Tracker.

via Chaos Group / Chaos Software official website – home – V-Ray® – award winning, production-ready 3D rendering solutions.

Graphics chaos group, software, vray

3dTotal has taken the step of placing the entire reference image and high-resolution texture library online for free, albeit with some interesting terms:

All images within this library are royalty free for you to use in your work, but please note that they are subject to the License Agreement and we offer you this service based on the condition that ad-blockers are NOT ALLOWED on 3DTotal.com. We only show non-intrusive and relevant banner adverts on 3DTotal which fund the site and the features that we can in turn bring to you!

Head on over to their site to start downloading!

via // Textures and Reference Free High Res Image Library, 12 500 images royalty free //.

Graphics free, images, texture

It’s still a rumor, but stories are that Nvidia is taking pre-orders on the upcoming GF100, the Fermi chip we’ve discussed before, with an uncommitted ship-date.

It is also said that the company is now taking pre-orders for the GF100 GPU, without any guarantees on the final shipping date for and to it’s partners. Designed on the 40nm fab process, the NVIDIA GF100 graphics processing unit is expected to end-up faster than AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 flagship card, although we have yet to receive specific numbers, features and information.

They are targeting HPC and workstation markets first, as they have the most use for the special features of the Fermi card.  As usual, this is all rumor right now so take it with a grain of salt.

via GeForce Fermi GF100 GPU Launches Early December.

Hardware fermi, nvidia, rumor

Astro Boy has just successfully navigated the rocky transition from ink to 3D with his new feature film, and CGSoceity talks to Director David Bowers about some of the unique challenges they faced in bringing a classic animated character to 3D.

“When you put him into 3D and turn his head, one of those horns will disappear and he doesn’t look like Astro Boy anymore.” The cheat they used was to occasionally switch the horn from the left to the right side depending on the location of the camera. “It’s a nod to the way he’s always been portrayed. I think it’s important that Astro Boy has the iconic two point shape.”

via CGSociety – ASTROBOY.

Graphics astroboy, makingof, movie, vfx