Today the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is going live with its new visualization resource, based on state-of-the-art technology from Sun Microsystems, AMD and NVIDIA. The new visualization system, based on Sun Fire X4600 and Sun Fire X4440 servers, will serve as the primary visualization resource for TACC users. Total system capability is 128 processing cores, 1 Terabyte aggregate memory and 32 NVIDIA GPUs.
A critical component of TACC's system is Sun Shared Visualization software and Sun Scalable Visualization software, both of which enable customers to process and analyze huge data sets, and interactively view 3D data using standard applications. To see a demo of the Sun Visualization software in action, check out this short video.
The system's master and visualization nodes will be integrated into the InfiniBand network fabric of the TACC supercomputer Ranger, the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open science research. This tight coupling with Ranger will enable users to visualize terascale data sets generated on Ranger, without having to transfer the data sets to a separate visualization resource for post processing.
If you're interested in hearing more, drop me a line.