Pixar has just announced a new render tool designed to replace their current Alfred and Alfserver products, named Tractor. Designed in 3 parts (Engine, Blade, and Dashboard), it is written in Python and designed for both large and small renderfarms with a simple license model of $99 per node.
Tractor’s streamlined design ensures quick deployment, and delivers high performance with a queuing engine capable of dispatching over 500 commands per second. Tractor 1.0 uses proven, open web standards and is highly customizable, for example allowing systems administrators to easily add Python extension modules to Tractor Blades and customize the specifics of how tasks are launched.
Visual Economics takes a look at the average American family in their latest infographic. It is always a bit fun to see how you compare to others. However, when you look at the average American household debt of $117,951, you have to remember that $95,000 of that is for the house itself. One thing that I did not realize is that 16.7% of Mississippi residents do not have a bank account. You learn something new every day.
The average American family has more debt than they know what to do with. Here’s a look at that debt and all the financial troubles they face.
Click the link below to go to the site and see the full graphic.
Tom Peterson has the world record for the Supersonic Sled Demo from Nvidia. He has posted a video on YouTube showing some of the secrets of the demo. Anyone want to take him on and try to beat it?
Here’s a video showing you how to get the best scores on the new GTX 480 demo game, Supersonic Sled. The demo uses tessellation, PhysX and is, overall, just a cool game. After you download and play the demo, you have a chance to show up on the leaderbaord where we’re posting the top run scores automatically.
You download the demo here. You can see the leaderboard here.
We have talked about the Gulf Oil Spill several days ago. Now some of the oil is creeping onto land near the Mississippi River Delta. NASA has taken another picture of the oil from its Terra satellite using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. I have taken the NASA version of the image and added some annotations to show you exactly where the spill is located in relation to surrounding landmarks.
A massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico continued spreading on April 29, 2010, moving perilously close to shore, according to news reports. The U.S. Coast Guard attempted controlled burns on some of the oil to prevent its spread, but had to halt the process due to high winds. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration constructed a dome-and-pipe system to contain the spread of oil at the sea floor.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured a natural-color image of the oil slick just off the Louisiana coast. The top image shows a wide-area view, and the bottom image shows a close-up view of the oil slick (outlined in white in the top image). The oil slick appears as dull gray interlocking comma shapes, one opaque and the other nearly transparent. The northwestern tip of the oil slick almost touches the Mississippi Delta. Sunglint—the mirror-like reflection of the Sun off the water—enchances the oil slick’s visibility.
Guru3d is at it again. In the past they have added extra voltage to a GeForce GTX 480 and a GeForce GTX 470 to see how far you could overclock them. Today, they take three GeForce GTX 480 cards and put them into triple SLI mode to see how well they perform. Take a look at that picture to the right and realize that it required a 1.2 Kilowatt power supply to power the system. Under load, the system consumed over 1 Kilowatt of power. Of course, overclocking the Core i7 965X to 3.75 GHz also adds to the power load.
But how did it perform? Was 3-way SLI worth it? Well, you will have to read the article to find out, although this little teaser should give you an idea.
Far Cry 2 did a little better, though 3-way SLI again is massively limited by the processor it at the very least scaled fairly nice. And 2-way SLI, well just look at 2560×1600… that’s roughly 1.9x performance over the single GPU GTX 480.
Intel has offered Hyperthreading, a hardware level multi-thread optimization technique that turns a single physical core into two “virtual” cores, in their last several processors. In my experience, its use in CPU-heavy applications (like Rendering) hasn’t been worth the penalty, typically increasing render times as you watch CPU’s trade off performance. As one virtual core works, you see the other virtual core drop to 60-70% utilization. The new Nehalem processors claim to have greatly improved the Hyperthreading support, and luckily I just upgraded one of my computers to support these new processors.
My new machine has dual Intel Xeon 5560′s, that’s a total of 8 physical cores running at 2.8Ghz. My machine contains 24G of Ram and is running WindowsXP64 (I know, it’s old) and Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max 2010. A friend (someone much more experienced at 3dsMax than I) built me a scene that rendered using Mental Ray at a whopping 2600 pixels wide. The resulting scene rendered to completion in 23 minutes, 45 seconds.
After a reboot where I enabled Hyperthreading, we attempted the render again on the new 16-core configuration. Exact same setup, just clicked “Render” and it completed in 19 minutes, 14 seconds.
For the math novices out there, that’s a savings of 4 minutes, 30 seconds on the render with nothing but enabling hyperthreading. That’s a saving of almost 20%!
We’re still doing more tests and benchmarks, but so far the results are promising. If you have Nehalem processors, try it yourself and post your own results in the comments!
If you want to take any of the CS5 tools for a test-drive but don’t feel like dropping the thousands of dollars to buy them, you’re in luck as Adobe has just released the 30-day trial versions. They all seem fully-functional, but are limited to 30-days of use before you have to Buy or Uninstall.
In an attempt to better connect with the public and drive some new public interest in the waning Mars rover projects, NASA has taken some guidance from James Cameron and added a 3D Camera to the next Mars Rover named “Curiosity”. The original design actually included a 3D camera, but it was dropped back in 2007 for budget concerns.
“It’s a very ambitious mission. It’s a very exciting mission,” Cameron said. “(The scientists are) going to answer a lot of really important questions about the previous and potential future habitability of Mars.”
The camera will be capable of filming at 10fps, not very impressive by modern hardware standards. Given the lack of much motion on the surface of Mars and that the data stream must be compressed and transmitted over such a vast difference, 10fps is probably pretty good. Unfortunately, the camera is still in development and may not be ready in time for Curiosity, only time will tell.
I first saw the news of the CI Fellow program (Computing Innovation) over at InsideHPC, but blew it off as irrelevant to us here. Looks like I might have been a bit hasty, as now Robert Kosara (eagereyes) has announced that he is one of the mentors and is looking to take someone on at UNC Charlotte.
I am interested in two broad areas: theory of information visualization and visualization for visual communication. The theory side is about some of the topics described in my recent Year of InfoVis Theory article, and obviously thinking that topic further. Communication is about how to get information across to people, so they're engaged and retain that information. Perhaps that involves lots of embellishments, or perhaps it involves storytelling, or perhaps something else entirely. There’s only one way to find out.
To qualify, you have to complete you Ph.D. between May 1 2009 and August 31 2010, and you’ll be paid $75k a year plus benefits for the work.
Before I get to the links, I wanted to let you know (if you haven’t already figured out) that I’ve integrated some of the new “FaceBook Social Widgets” here on VizWorld. You’ll see a simple FaceBook “Like” button accompanying each post, similar to the large FaceBook Share button, and the “Social Stream” on the front page sidebar where you can see what your friends have been checking out here on VizWorld. If it causes you any trouble, let me know.
Pixar has just announced a new render tool designed to replace their current Alfred and Alfserver products, named Tractor. Designed in 3 parts (Engine, Blade, and Dashboard), it is written in Python and designed for both large and small renderfarms with a simple license model of $99 per node.
Intel has offered Hyperthreading, a hardware level multi-thread optimization technique that turns a single physical core into two “virtual” cores, in their last several processors. In my experience, its use in CPU-heavy applications (like Rendering) hasn’t been worth the penalty, typically increasing render times as you watch CPU’s trade off performance. As one virtual core works, you see the other virtual core drop to 60-70% utilization. The new Nehalem processors claim to have greatly improved the Hyperthreading support, and luckily I just upgraded one of my computers to support these new processors.
If you want to take any of the CS5 tools for a test-drive but don’t feel like dropping the thousands of dollars to buy them, you’re in luck as Adobe has just released the 30-day trial versions. They all seem fully-functional, but are limited to 30-days of use before you have to Buy or Uninstall.
In an attempt to better connect with the public and drive some new public interest in the waning Mars rover projects, NASA has taken some guidance from James Cameron and added a 3D Camera to the next Mars Rover named “Curiosity”. The original design actually included a 3D camera, but it was dropped back in 2007 for budget concerns.
I first saw the news of the CI Fellow program (Computing Innovation) over at 
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