NEWS BRIEFS
New Orleans, LA — SGI and over 15 leading representatives from education, government research and industry today announced the formation of the Visual Serving Initiative program. The Visual Serving Initiative program is a collaborative effort between SGI and industry leaders to accelerate the deployment of end-to-end solutions using the breakthrough SGI OpenGL Vizserver technology. It is composed of an advisory board, software testing program, advanced development projects and a technical liaison.
The Visual Serving Initiative program will drive the implementation of new features that increase the impact of OpenGL Vizserver and will bring together interested parties in education, research and industry to prototype new Visual Serving solutions. This initiative will break more new ground by working with members of the telecommunications, networking and ASP communities to increase the availability of the scalable network bandwidth that is a cornerstone of Visual Serving environments.
We are very excited by the formation of the Visual Serving Initiative program,” said Jan Silverman, vice president of Advanced Systems Marketing. “Visual Serving solutions are changing the way that scientists and engineers do their work by delivering the capabilities of our most powerful visualization systems to low-cost desktops.”
SGI Visual Serving solutions enable scientists and engineers to work from their offices and use existing desktop systems as a window into the power of high-end graphics, compute, and data management systems. Individuals can be more productive and reduce their time to discovery because they can interact with full-scale, high-resolution data sets and take advantage of the scalable computing and I/O capability of an SGI Onyx family system. In return, organizations will increase their return on investment for existing Silicon Graphics Onyx2 systems, or new SGI Onyx 3000 series systems, by increasing the number of users that can access them at different times of the day.
“With OpenGL Vizserver, our users are able to interactively analyze seismic volumes that are up to 200 times larger and 20 times faster than were possible with desktop workstations,” said Daniel F. Knupp, Manager of Visualization Services at Veritas DGC; Geophysical Service Company. “With OpenGL Vizserver, the company hopes to set up facilities at remote offices and client sites that will allow employees to show products and results that would normally require the relocation of people to a site where large-memory, SGI Onyx family systems with large volume visualization capabilities are available.”
The first meeting of the Visual Serving Initiative Advisory Board will take place by the end of October 2000 and will be attended by the founding members. These members include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Manchester University, UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, National Supercomputing Centre (Linkoping, Sweden), and Veritas DGC; Geophysical Service Company, among others. Additional information regarding SGI Visual Serving solutions as well as an invitation to join the initiative is available from the Visual Serving Initiative web site at http://www.sgi.com/visual_serving .
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