New OpenSolaris Project: Visualization for HPC

The OpenSolaris site has added a new project on Visualization for HPC.

In this context, visualization is the process of converting large amounts of complex, multi-dimensional data into images so people can more quickly and easily see patterns and anomalies in the data. Visualization technologies are widely used within the HPC community to enable better understanding of the ever larger data sets that computer simulations and sensor networks are creating.

The OpenSolaris Visualization Project has three primary goals:

1. Provide tools for building visualization server systems that can handle these massive amounts of data with sufficient performance. Many tools for scalable visualization (defined as harnessing the capability of multiple graphics devices to deal with very large data sets) are available in the open source community, primarily deployed on Linux and Windows platforms. One goal of the Visualization project on opensolaris.org is to provide a complete integrated and tuned stack of software for scalable visualization on Solaris.

2. Provide easy access for any user anywhere to such systems, the programs these systems run, and the images they produce. These users can use many different types of client systems—Sun Ray™ thin clients, notebook and desktop PCs and Macs, and workstations. A second goal of the proposed visualization project is to provide software for enabling remote visualization and collaboration.

3. Provide additional visualization applications and tools for building, analyzing, or tuning visualization applications on Solaris. Full Story