Glasgow school of art partners with SGI to combine art and technology

Glasgow, 29 October 97 Silicon Graphics has supplied the Glasgow School of Art with high-performance workstations, servers and 3D-graphic computers for its new centre for creative excellence, the Digital Design Studio. The Studio will train artists, designers, film-makers and engineers to work with advanced technologies that have become the 'tools of the trade' within many industries. The total value of the systems is over half a million pounds.

Based in the House for an Art Lover, designed by Charles Rennie Macintosh, the Digital Design Studio claims to offer unique training and education in professional creativity skills. Students at the Digital Design Studio study an M.Phil. degree course in 2D and 3D Motion Graphics and Virtual Prototyping. The course currently has 10 students from a variety of backgrounds including art, engineering, design and product design.

The students will be directly involved in a research project being undertaken by Ford Motor Company. Ford will be using the Studio to develop new technologies for its designers to use in the creation of cars. According to Ford, the project will study a number of advanced technologies, focusing on stereo imaging.

The Digital Design Studio's computer network includes 18 Silicon Graphics O2 workstations; three Silicon Graphics Indigo2 workstations; one single and two dual processor Silicon Graphics OCTANE workstations, featuring Crossbar Switch architectures and symmetric multiprocessing; a Silicon Graphics Origin 200 file server; and a Silicon Graphics two-processor Onyx2 InfiniteReality 3D supercomputer.

The systems were supplied by Silicon Graphics' resource centre Open Computers & Finance (OCF). The facility is linked to a 155 Mbit/s ATM backbone and has a 100 Base10 switched Fast Ethernet network running between each computer. The computer systems run software tools from Alias|Wavefront, as well as applications from Softimage and Avid. ICEM Surf and SDRC's Master Series IV will be installed in the future. The workstations have MIPS RISC R10000 CPUs, 128 or 256 Megabyte of memory, and 2 Gigabyte of storage. The Silicon Graphics Origin 200 file server has 28 Gigabyte of storage.

The Onyx2 3D machine comes with Silicon Graphics Infinite Reality graphics system, full texture memory of 256 Megabyte, 2 Raster Managers, 500 Megabyte of memory and 4 Gigabyte of storage. The Digital Design Studio also has a sound studio, Beta SP facilities, and a Monkey 2 System. The Monkey 2 System is a skeletal frame that can be modelled as a bird, mammal, or fish. When linked to a computer it enables a computer-generated model to mimic its movements for more realistic animation.

Sandra Wermer