VizWorld.com

The pivotal scene of “Men Who Stare At Goats” consists of a simple goat that seemingly dies from the menacing stare of George Clooney, using the power of his mind to stop the goat’s heart.  The final shot consisted of a CG goat that had to seamless transition between the live action goat, but react realistically.  CIS Hollywood talks about how they created this scene.

The digital goat was modeled and rigged in Maya. Explained Henke, “we posed the rig of the goat in the plate and further tweaked the model to match the live action goat. In addition we scanned the surrounding shots and lined up 3D cameras to gauge the model’s proportions from different views – we didn’t want to end up faking a part of the anatomy that matched the fore-shortening of the goat standing but became unappealing when the goat fell down.”

via CGSociety – Men Who Stare at Goats.

Graphics cis, movie, vfx

Intel CTO Justin Rattner’s opening address at SC09 this morning was entertaining, although it left many people wondering what it really had to do with traditional HPC, and came off a little more “infomercial” than educational.  Comments like this didn’t help:

In tests that Intel has done in the labs, it has demonstrated that the computing requirements needed to simulate worlds takes on a log scale as users are added, their interactions increase, and the realism of the simulations increases. “It is an n2 relationship, and n2 problems always warm the cockles of my heart because n2 means revenue.”

The thrust of his talk was that HPC is stagnating as it stands right now, and the “3D Web” could be a way to reinvigorate the market, foster new hardware acquisitions, and make it more accessible to users worldwide.  The Register has a great writeup of it if you missed the stream.

via Intel: 3D Web to save HPC • The Register.

Hardware, Science hpc, intel, sc09

Fans of the funny green leaf have long stated that if it was adopted by the US and taxed like cigarettes or alcohol, the revenues would be immense and crime would be reduced.  But, just how much revenue would there be?  A new infographic at sloshspot compiled the data and has a nice infographic.

Love it or hate it, people smoke marijuana – lots of it. In some states marijuana consumption and posession have been decriminalized, and even legalized for medicinal purposes. But, have you ever wondered how large the economics of Marijuana were? Us too. As a result ,have decided to put together this graphic, which illustrates the popularity of marijuana consumption, the federal tax dollars spent to keep marijuana illegal, and the possible tax revenues that could be generated if marijuana production were legalized and taxed like any other agricultural product. It is especially interesting, with regards to the Great Recession:

The information is collected from various government agencies and NORML.org.

via If Marijuana Production Were Legal: Projected Tax Revenues, by State | Sloshspot Blog.

Graphics economic, government, infographic, marijuana

To promote their new web-based HD Videoconferencing solution, EVO has setup a social networking site called EVOGreen.  Go create an account and in a few days you’ll be able to download the “Lite” version of their product, free for use for 30 days.  After that if you like it, it’s a mere $200/year.

EVOGreen

Science evo, videoconference

If you couldn’t make it to Portland for SC09 this year but you want to see what’s going on in the “3D Internet” track, you can hit Intel’s website to view a live stream of Intel CTO Justin Rattner’s Opening Address kicking off the topic.

Intel Software Network at SuperComputing SC09 – Intel® Software Network.

Science conference, sc09, stream

I’m waiting for the SC09 Opening Address to begin (“The Rise of the 3D Internet”, by Intel’s Justin Rattner) and on the opening video reel they have a fantastic video from Sheldon Brown of the Experimental Game Lab at UCSD of a project called “Scalable City”.

Scalable City creates an urban/suburban/rural environment via a data visualization pipeline. Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.

Throughout these artworks, a variety of computer concept buzzwords take on physical form. Wallowing in them provides equal measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms that we are rapidly creating. The project neither indicts nor embraces this future, but offers an extrapolation of its algorithmic tendencies, heightening one's awareness of the aesthetics of the underlying logic as it becomes the determinant of much of our cultured existence.

The video is impressive, and you can see screenshots and the trailer on his website.

via Scalable City by Sheldon Brown.

Graphics, Science art, city, sc09, ucsd

Nvidia today has a new reason to believe that there really are no competitors in the GPGPU space, 5 new reason in fact, as they won 5 of the annual HPCWire Readers’ & Editors’ choice awards:

• Best HPC Software Product of Technology (Editors’ Choice) – CUDA
• Top5 new products or technologies to watch (Readers’ Choice) – Fermi
• Top 5 new products or Technologies to Watch (Editors’ Choice) – Fermi
• top 5 Vendors to Watch (Editors’ Choice) – NVidia
• People to Watchin 2010 – Jen-Hsun Huang, President & CEO of NVidia

A real coup for NVidia.  When asked, Andy Keane had this to say:

“We’re honored to receive a record five awards for our products and technologies in the HPC space, especially a Readers' Choice as this comes directly from the community,” said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at NVIDIA. “Products based on our Fermi architecture are going to transform a wide range of HPC fields and we're excited to see that the community agrees.”

via 2009 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards Recognize Rise of NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Solutions.

Hardware, Science award, cuda, fermi, nvidia

Following the successful style of StackOverflow, SquarePolygon allows users to post questions and answers to questions related to 3D and Visualization topics.  Along the way you earn reputation points that you can use as bragging rights over the “less reputable”.

3D Modelling, Rendering and Visualisation | Square Polygon.

Graphics squarepolygon, Website

The not-so-secret HPC that’s going to bring SGI back to superiority as the premium SSI HPC provider has finally been announced: Ultraviolet.

UV features the fifth generation of the NUMAlink interconnect, offering a 15 GB/sec transfer rate, MPI offload capability in the UV hub chip, and direct access up to 16 TB of shared memory. The system can be configured with up to 2048 Nehalem-EX cores shipping Q2 next year from Intel in a single system image, and as with the 4700 multiple SSIs can be federated together while preserving the single global address space. When I was being briefed on the launch before the show, Jill Matzke, Altix product manager, reminded me that SGI has been very active in the Linux community: all the IP needed to make this shared-memory goodness work has been contributed back to the SUSE and Red Hat communities, so you can actually load a stock distro on your UV when it shows up, and everything will work.

Price and availability are still a bit fuzzy, as SGI is waiting for Intel to announce the new Nehalem chips that it uses, but it’s great to see SGI rising back to HPC powerhouse status.  I’ll be meeting with SGI tomorrow afternoon and hope to get more details then.

via SGI finally announces make-or-break HPC platform | insideHPC.com.

Hardware hpc, sc09, sgi, ultraviolet

MPC’s Evian Spot “Skating Babies” just received the honor of being inducted into the Guinness Book of Records for  Most Viewed Online Advertisement.

Adding up views for various versions of the ad across video sharing websites, the Guinness Book of Records has bestowed the honour on the ad for having 45,166,109 views as of 9 November 2009.

It’s a great commercial if you haven’t seen it, and deserving of the honor.

via Evian roller babies makes Guinness Book of Records with 45 million online views – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic.

Graphics commercial, evian, mpc, vfx