New HP massively scalable Visualization Center sv6Palo Alto 13 August 2001 Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced its first commercially available, massively scalable visualization architecture. The architecture and the first product based on the architecture: the HP visualization center sv6. This configuration initially will support up to 80 graphics pipelines exceeding 500 million polygons per second.
The HP visualization center sv6 allows the manipulation of digital objects as if they were clay in the designers' hands. In industries such as automotive, aerospace and heavy equipment manufacturing, this capability helps drive down costs and speed time to market by resolving design and manufacturability issues earlier in the product development cycle.
HP's visualization architecture permits the scaling of computing performance, image quality and display resolution -- all independently of each other. The aggregate bandwidth of the components, or "graphics pipelines," of this architecture drives application performance to new levels.
The architecture's performance scaling on multiple graphics pipelines is transparent to the application and does not require special programming. Users can specify performance and image quality parameters on the fly to satisfy changing design requirements.
HP's architecture exploits advances in processor and graphics technology to produce powerful graphics pipelines. These pipelines are interconnected through a high-speed fabric on the processor end and a digital compositor on the graphics end. Modifications to OpenGL and Xserver software enable applications to transparently distribute rendering work across multiple systems while a compositor assembles these renderings into a single image.
The first product -- the HP visualization center sv6 -- uses the HP workstation j6000 with HP fx10pro graphics as the graphics pipeline. This configuration initially will support up to 80 graphics pipelines exceeding 500 million polygons per second. Supported display technologies range from desktop monitors to large-scale immersive theaters.
In a resource-constrained environment, a key benefit of the architecture
is that processing elements may be used for other general-purpose computation when not being used for
visualization. The architecture is designed to use the industry's best processors (CPUs), graphics and networking
technologies as core building blocks, so customers will have a solution that helps meet their evolving needs.
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