America’s Favorite Bacon Dishes
1:05 pm
Autodesk Labs Utilities Project Vasari 2.1
10:56 am
Autodesk Labs has just rolled out the latest version of their “Project Vasari” system, offering BIM simulation capabilities to their Revit product.
Project Vasari is focused on conceptual building design using both geometric and parametric modeling. It supports performance-based design via integrated energy modeling and analysis features. This new technology preview is now available as a free download and trial on Autodesk Labs.
The new version offers energy models and wind tunnel analysis, two useful features for those in BIM. Check out the video below for their demonstrations.
Kitware releases VTK 5.8.0
10:48 am
Everyone’s favorite visualization library VTK has just gotten another major upgrade. The new 5.8 release offers lots of new features including:
- Improved Unicode Support
- OpenGL accelerated 2D Charts like Pie Charts & Histograms
- Support for Polyhedron Cells
- A new GPU based Mapper for Glyphs
- Integration of HDF5 1.8.5
- Much more…
Go hit their site to download it and check it out.
SGI looks for Opportunity in HP & IBM Flubs
9:33 am
An article in the Times of India talks about the growth of SGI, the doubly-failed supercomputing company, in the wake of certain flubs by HP and IBM. Before I begin the dissection, I think these paragraphs are worth reading closely:
“Ninety days back, Leo announced HP’s new future to be in mobility, cloud and connectivity . Ninety days later, he withdraws mobility and connectivity, recalling its TouchPad and a planned spinoff of its PC business.” HP’s uncertainty is turning out to be good for Barrenechea’s USbased supercomputing company which recently posted better than expected results even in an uncertain economic environment.
…
“IBM just walked away from a customer at the University of Illinois, a $200-million dollar project. I don’t know how you will build a trusted relationship with a customer when you are willing to stand up to an important system and say just kidding,” added Barrenechea , who was the CTO of CA Inc before joining the SGI board in 2006.
Got to give them credit, I think HP’s uncertainty will be a boon for many companies, not just SGI. However, I don’t see how HP pulling out of tablet computing is really going to do much for SGI’s HPC business.
As for the 2nd one, I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. Talking smack about IBM and Blue Waters after they busted the $30M PSC deal (More here and here) really shows how short their own memory is. Of course now NCSA is looking for another system to fill their floor, but they’ve first got to secure funding and such so it’s probably a good year away. The Blue Waters system was an NSF system (targeted for DARPA research) but I bet DARPA won’t be paying for another system hosted at NCSA anytime soon, so that leaves NSF or other agencies to pickup the tab. With NSF focusing on heavy petascale+ systems, they tend to be offering bigger awards less frequently.
Of course, none of anything mentioned here has anything to do with Graphics. SGI really needs to find a new meaning for that G.
Update 12:43pm – Clarified that Blue Waters was funded by NSF, but targeted for DARPA research.
via Times of India and HPCwire
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 14/09/2011
7:00 am
The events that occurred in 09/11 rank as the 2nd most costly catastrophe in the world, according to America Public Media‘s infographic, and had a terrible impact on the travel and aviation industries, as we can see on Travelpod‘s piece. The folks at Reuse This Bag and Reuters rounded up a lot of numbers and facts surrounding 09/11, and The University of Sidney explains why the WTC towers collapsed.
VizWorld.com 
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