Katy Perry’s Tour Rider
4:00 pm
Unpaid Work Around the World
3:45 pm
SGI Marks Milestone with over 500 UV Systems Delivered
3:12 pm
I’ve got to admit, I’m impressed by SGI. I really thought the UV system was going to be the albatross that drug SGI to Davy Jones’ locker, but they’re actually doing ok. A press-release out today announces 500 Altix UV systems delivered. Now, most companies wouldn’t even bother announcing 500 systems (Dell probably ships 500 systems in a day or less), but these are significantly bigger and more expensive that your average computer.
As the world’s most scalable x86 platform, customers can deploy standard Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows-based applications to the maximum scale possible of 256 physical cores and 2 terabytes of memory. Altix UV 1000 with 256 cores of Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series and 2 TB of memory has four times the x86 scalability of HP and 2.6 times the scalability of IBM.
Their partnership with Microsoft for Windows HPC Server is probably a big reason they’ve done as well as they have, as Windows HPC Server really seems to be taking off in Financial HPC. I’m not aware of anyone doing petascale work with UV’s, but maybe they’re on to something in the high-but-not-extreme end of HPC.
Of course, their financials still seem a little fishy to me. We’ll see how they look at the end of the year.
via SGI Marks Supercomputing Milestone with over 500 Altix UV Systems Delivered | Business Wire.
First Casualty of Disney-Pixar is “Planes”
2:18 pm
A new trailer from “DisneyToon” studios, not to be confused with Pixar, seems to be a Cars spinoff called “Planes”. Via a short film, probably accompanying next weekend’s “Cars 2″, the scene is set for this direct-to-DVD release.
Apparently Pixar has made a new short linking Cars 2 to Planes, but that seems to be their only official involvement — if you look closely at that logo above it says “Disney,” not “Disney-Pixar,” and I think that is a very telling sign of what to expect from this money-grabbing tie-in. Where will they go next? Jonathan reckons Trains, Anton then suggested they could go for a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Z says he’s, “…holding out for the inevitable DreamWorks knockoff: Helicopters.”
Update 4pm: Looks like Disney is trying very hard to take the trailer down.. Best bet is to just search youtube or google for “Disney Planes”.
New From Pixar — Er, Disney — Comes Planes | GeekDad | Wired.com.
Indigo Renderer & IndigoRT 3.0
1:04 pm
Click for Fullsize
I haven’t heard much from the Indigo Renderer crew lately, but I just noticed that they’ve now released Indigo 3.0. Boasting CUDA & OpenCL support, network rendering, integrated queue management, and much more, it really is starting to look more like a professional grade tool, more than ever before.
Many changes resulting in improved rendering performance and image quality have been made in the core. Indigo 3.0 produces better images for the same number of samples per pixel as 2.x.
Indigo 3.0 also introduces optional camera vignetting and faster HDR environment mapping.
Looks like they’ve put some significant work into their bump-mapping code as well, as evidenced by the image to the right. You can see more of what they’ve added in the Video Preview below.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 14/06/2011
7:00 am
In the end of 2010, the folks at IGN released a list of the most expected games of 2011 – our first pick of the day. Then, a couple of graphics about this year’s edition of the E3 Expo, by Game Front and Web Trends, followed by a look at 3d in video games, brought by 3DS Guide and The Playstation Blog.
AMD Announces New GPGPU Programming Tools
7:24 pm
AMD isn’t taking the success of their Fusion APU’s for granted, and is more openly embracing the GPGPU and OpenCL ecosystem with a collection of tools aimed at making OpenCL just as easy as CUDA.
One of the new tools, gDEBugger, is an “advanced OpenCL and OpenGL debugger, profiler, and memory analyzer.” AMD acquired the software when it purchased graphics startup Graphic Remedy in October 2010. Other programs, which aren’t expected until Q3 2011, include Parallel Path Analyzer (useful for optimizing a program to run across both CPU and GPU), Global Memory for Acceleration (simplifies memory management) and the Task Manager API. This last is described as “a framework for managing compute tasks in a heterogeneous multi-core environment. OpenCL kernels can be automatically scheduled to execute on an available and task-appropriate device, providing dynamic load balancing, optimizing use of available compute resources and removing the burden of explicit schedule handling.”
via AMD Announces New GPGPU Programming Tools – HotHardware.
15 Stunning Public Health Infographics
3:30 pm
The Health Hawk has a nice list of 15 infographics related to Public Health covering everything from mortality rates to lifestyle habits.
There is a lot of information out there about the distributing of health resources, as well as information here at home about the threats we face to our health. If you are interested in information about public health, there are some great infographics that can illustrate different statistics. Here are 15 public health infographics:
VizWorld.com 
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