Visualize This

Trying out 3D on a Sun Ray

Inside Sun, it is trivially easy to try this out since Sun Rays are everywhere.
Just email me and I'll send you a script and guest password to log into a system we are using as a test 3D graphics server for the ProE application.

Outside Sun, it is not trivial but still easy if you have a Sun Ray. You can download the Shared Visualization software from the Sun Download Center at http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=465f0f01
and install it on your own system with 3D graphics to turn it into a graphics server.

If you don't have a Sun Ray, you can use your laptop or desktop system as a client. There is a little client piece of software to install on the clients as well, that comes with the Shared Visualization software download. Shared Viz software is based on the VirtualGL open source project. It adds management of shared graphics resources to VirtualGL's transparent remoting of OpenGL applications. You can also download VirtualGL from http://www.virtualgl.org/

Posted at 11:35AM Sep 17, 2007 by Linda Fellingham in Sun  |  Comments[3]

Shared Vision

We are developing software for visualization solutions. Why?

Visualization provides essential tools for UNDERSTANDING the masses of data that people are grinding out with all those teraflops of computing and storing on all those petabytes of storage in the "red shift" industries. 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.

We are trying to solve two problems - build systems that can handle these massive amounts of data with sufficient performance AND provide easy access to any user anywhere to such systems. Sort of breaking the workstation chains. Not quite as dramatic as changing the name of SUNW.

The purpose of this weblog is to:

1. Let people know about the tools we've developed and where to find and how to use them.

2. Talk about (and also find out about more) some of the really cool things people are doing with this technology.

For example - did you know you can run 3D applications like ProE and Project Wonderland (with graphics hw acceleration) from any Sun Ray?

Another example is the Allosphere at the California Nanosystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara.
It is (and I am not kidding!) a 30 foot diameter sphere that is a projection screen with a bridge inside that can hold 15 people. Imagine being completely immersed in high-resolution stereo 3D graphics and surrounded by 200 Surround Sound speakers. I am going to see the facility next Wednesday. (I SO want to build the visualization system for this!)

Posted at 05:17PM Sep 14, 2007 by Linda Fellingham in Sun  |  Comments[3]