VizWorld.com

FireUser has just posted the final piece in a multi-part series on the use of Remote Graphics in profressional  environments. In it is focuses mostly on AMD’s offerings, but does a good job of showing where remote graphics can shine and where it tends to fall down.

“The real question is not if you should replace all of your high end workstations, but rather to examine when and where it makes economic and performance sense. For the true CAD power user, remote graphics is not there yet in terms of matching performance with a dedicated local workstation with a top-of-the-line FirePro or Quadro-based graphics card.

via Remote Graphics and the Professional CAD Workstation, Part 4: Sustainability | FireUser Blog.

Hardware amd, remotedisplay

A surprising new piece of hardware from AMD combines their FirePro cards with the TeraDici PCoIP technology to offer high-end Dual-Screen FirePro quality graphics to remote visualization systems a’la Thin Client Solutions.

The demonstration in the video is across a room, but the technology supports longer links via WAN or VPN solutions.  The various parts of the technology are nothing new, but this is the first time I’ve seen a major player (AMD/ATI) integrate it all into a single-card solution so simple to use.

Low-power, energy efficient ATI FirePro RG220 for cloud computing workstation graphics | FireUser Blog.

Hardware amd, ati, remotedisplay, teradici

PhysOrg has more information about the spectactular remote visualization and volume rendering shown in the San Diego Supercomputing booth at SC09, which makes use of Eureka, the TeraGrid, 200 NVidia GPU’s, and high speed networks to stream high-resolution images around the world.

“As a team, we were able to link institutions across the country and leverage high performance computing, visualization resources, high speed networks and advanced displays in real-time,” said Joe Insley, principal software developer at Argonne. “But what was really wonderful was seeing the scientists get excited about the possibilities that this will enable.”

The simulation was part of a 2009 TeraGrid allocation using a 4000^3 grid of 64 billion dark matter particles, running for over 4 million CPU hours.  With data that massive, remote visualization isn’t just a nicety, it’s a requirement.

Argonne streaming visualization sends images across the world (w/ Video).

Science argonne, remotedisplay, teragrid, vl3

Here’s something I definately hope to check out next week at SC09, a live demonstration from NASA and Obsidian Strategics of remote visualization across a pair of 10GB Ethernet circuits, carrying 20Gbits/s of visualization traffic from Mountain View, CA to Portland, OR.

Obsidian’s Dr. David Southwell observes “Remote visualization applications are very demanding on the network, being bandwidth intensive and sensitive to latency, loss, arrival time jitter and quality of service. NASA’s InfiniBand-based supercomputers interface naturally to Obsidian’s Longbow E100 products, which transparently extend InfiniBand over 10 GbEthernet WAN connections in a manner that preserves all of InfiniBand’s properties (such as determinism and lossless flow control) while simultaneously applying standards-based AES-192-GCM cryptography”.

via NASA Launches Remote Real-Time Visualization Demo at SC09 Over Fully Encrypted 20Gbit/s Link Using Obsidian’s New E Series Longbow | Press Releases @ Your Story.

Hardware, Science nasa, remotedisplay, sc09

With all the news about NVidia’s GT300 you might forget that NVidia already has some pretty powerful equipment in their QuadroPlex line.  Well, Ohio Supercomputing Center (OSC) didn’t forget and they’re making the QuadroPlex 2200 S4 the foundation of their newest remote visualization offering to researchers.

“OSC chose the NVIDIA Quadro Plex solutions for their optimized support of CG, GLSL, CUDA and OpenCL”, said Don Stredney, Director, OSC Interface lab. “This will allow OSC to further explore both interactive volume rendering of extremely large data sets, through CUDA programming, and additional uses in remote visualization. Now, numerous faculty, staff, and students will have access to the unique architectural environment to expand current coursework as well as research in the areas of extremely large scale image processing, molecular dynamics, data mining, scientific and information visualization.”

via PNY Technologies, Inc. :: Ohio Supercomputing Center Offers Remote Interactive Visualization Using NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2200 S4 Supplied by PNY and JRTI.

Hardware, Science hpc, nvidia, osc, remotedisplay

High performance remote rendering is somewhat the “holy grain” of visualization and visual effects, allowing a single entity to manage a massive resource that’s farmed out to anyone who needs it.  One player in the remote rendering marketplace is DUX Soft in India, founded by Amit Srivastava, which runs a large render farm and computing grid that’s used by several companies.

The international clients’ list include names like Sony Pictures Imageworks, and the national list includes Maya Entertainment, Red Chillies, Tata Elxi VCL, etc.

The company aims to bring to the market more innovative products based solutions that address rendering, pipeline, asset management and storage.

This year, in 2009-10, DUX Soft expects to rake in revenues of $6 million.

The Express Computer article has a good writeup on their technology and software, and some of the hurdles they’ve had to overcome both technical and political.

via High performance remote rendering – Express Computer.

Graphics, Hardware duxsoft, hpc, remotedisplay, renderfarm

Hot on the heels of the TACC announcement, University of Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Science (NICS) have announced they will receive $10M from the NSF over the next 4 years to build a new “Center for Remote Data Analysis & Visualization (RDAV)”.  Just like TACC, first order of business in a new machine:

Much of RDAV will rely on a new machine named Nautilus that employs the SGI shared-memory processing architecture. The machine will feature 1,024 cores, 4,096 gigabytes of memory, and 16 graphics processing units. The new SGI system can independently scale processor count, memory, and I/O to very large levels in a single system running standard Linux. This flexibility will allow the RDAV team to configure a system uniquely capable of analyzing and visualizing petascale data sets, promising TeraGrid users new levels of scientific understanding.

And this impressive quote from Sean Ahern, research associate professor at the University of Tennesse and visualization task lead at ORNL where the machine will sit:

“I believe this will be the largest shared-memory machine for analysis on the planet,” said the project’s Principal Investigator (PI) Sean Ahern, who is currently the visualization task lead at ORNL and will serve as director of RDAV. “No one has ever done this before. The new system will handle data analysis algorithms that can’t be deployed on more traditional distributed memory systems.”

Of course, hardware isn’t all.  The center will also feature a full staff of visualization & analysis experts to aid researchers, and be available to TeraGrid researchers.

Read the full press release from the University of Tennessee and find some information about the organization of the RDAV center and some of the other individuals involved in this project.after the break, or read the announcement from their National Institute for Computational Sciences.

Read more…

Hardware, Science nsf, ornl, remotedisplay, sgi, visualization

I heard about this a while back but the Press Releases are just now hitting the wire, The NSF has awarded some additional grants.  The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) just got a 3-year contract for $7 million to build a comprehensive suite of visualization and data analysis services for the open science community.

“The capabilities of VDA resources have not kept pace with the explosive rate of data production leading to a critical juncture in computational science,” Gaither says. “Interactive visualization, data analysis and timely data assimilation are necessary for exploring important and challenging problems throughout science, engineering, medicine, national security and safety, to name a few important areas.”

First order of business is a new compute resource, named “Longhorn”, to enable interactive visualization of 1-petabyte datasets.  The gory details:

Longhorn System Capabilities

• Total Peak Performance (CPUs): 20.7 teraflops.
• Total Peak Performance (GPUs): 500 teraflops single precision floating point operations.
• Total Peak Rendering Performance: 154 billion triangles/sec.
• Total Memory: 13.5 terabytes.
• Total Disk: 210 terabyte global file system.

System Components and Technologies

• 256 Dell R610 and R710 servers each with two Intel Xeon 5500 processors.
• 512 CPUs with 2,048 Intel “Nehalem” (2.53GHz) quad-core processors.
• 128 NVIDIA Quadroplex 2200 S4 units each with four Quadro FX 5800 GPUs with 122,880 CUDA processor cores; 2,048 gigabytes (two terabytes) of distributed graphics RAM.

Visualization and Data Analysis Services

• A comprehensive collection of open source and commercial end-user VDA tools.
• Expert visualization support, including advanced interactive user support and training from a team comprising leading visualization researchers.
• A framework for rapidly integrating new visualization technologies from leading research teams to increase user capabilities throughout the project.

Read the full press release after the break.

Read more…

Hardware, Science nsf, remotedisplay, tacc

AMD’s on a roll, now up with a powerful demonstration of the combined potential of their new GPU architecture and the OTOY remote gaming service.

While AMD gave a number of very impressive demos of their next-generation DirectX 11 part (detailed technical discussion to follow later this month), OTOY’s demo of Crysis running on an iPhone was probably the most profoundly intriguing use of AMD’s upcoming GPU that I saw all evening.

Ok, I know that 90 percent of you just did a double-take—Crysis, the standard gaming benchmark for high-end 3D hardware, running on a next-gen GPU on an iPhone? Let me explain.

Remote visualization services are very similar to this new generation of remote gaming services (Gaikai, OnLive, OTOY), and I   look forward to the cross-pollenation of data between them.  Getting my 2 Terabyte dataset back to my PC at 60fps remotely would be awesome.

via AMD’s next-gen GPU powers Crysis on an iPhone – Ars Technica.

Graphics, Hardware amd, iphone, otoy, remotedisplay, video game

At the upcoming 17th Industrial Virtual Reality Expo at Tokyo Big-Sight (June 24-26), ELSA will be demonstrating a new External PCI-Express Remote 3D Graphic Solution.  The demo uses the ELSA Vridge X100 Quad 8 PCI-Express extension system powered by Lucid’s Hydra 100 to enable high-quality 3D graphics and HD video to be streamed remotely through an IP network using Teradici’s PC-over-IP technology.  In a single Vridge system you can install two NVidia Quadro fX5800′s and 2 ELSA VIXEL H200 remote host cards.  Ironically, the demo will be in the SGI Japan Booth (23-14).

The goal is to create super-powered workstations that can be centrally located in  single datacenter, with displays remotely provided over LAN or high-latency WAN links to users.

Read the full press release after the break.

Read more…

Hardware conference, elsa, lucidlogic, nvidia, pcoip, remotedisplay, teradici