Teamwork for images

SGI has released products that offer new technology to bring more complex graphics to PCs and other client systems, without requiring high-end visualisation systems on the client side. The firm said the technology could be especially useful for medical and scientific sectors because it lets one or many users interact with complex images from remote locations.

Called Visual Area Networking (VAN), the SGI technology lets users store and adjust graphics on desktops by receiving images from visualisation servers as compressed bitmap frames rather than as raw data that would need large local storage and processing capabilities.

VAN works with unmodified applications based on SGI's OpenGL API. Jan Silverman, senior vice president of marketing at SGI, said, "VAN combines the best of distributed computing, the workstation model, with centralised computing, which lets workstations users get a view of the bigger picture that only bigger systems can handle." Silverman said improvements in the VAN model could eventually let PDAs and other handhelds interact with complex graphics.

Underpinning the VAN technology is the launch of a workstation, supercomputer graphics subsystems and updated software. The new graphics subsystems, In- finitePerformance and InfiniteReality3, are fitted to Onyx 3000 and Onyx 300 supercomputers respectively. The new workstation is called the Silicon Graphics Fuel. The software enabling users to work with the graphics models either individually or as a team is OpenGL Vizserver 2.0.