Virtu Becomes Reality
A New Family of Solutions Continues SGI's Legacy of Visual Innovation

In the Information Age, more information can lead to more accurate results and increasingly incisive conclusions.

But for engineers, scientists and creative professionals, today's massive data sets may represent too much of a good thing. In fact, many users are seeing their data volumes doubling every six to 18 months. Analyzing all that information requires advanced visualization resources that allow users to make sense of the data quickly and accurately—not to mention resources that can scale as problems grow more complex.

Now SGI is making that once-daunting task dramatically easier with the SGI® Virtu™ solutions family, a new generation of SGI® visualization systems. The SGI® Virtu™ VN200, the first member of the Virtu family, is designed to power the performance visualization needs of today's HPC and commercial business users.

The Virtu VN200 solution brings a new level of productivity, flexibility, power and accuracy to users struggling to process today's large data sets. And it arrives in a platform that will accelerate the adoption of visualization within data-intensive environments.

Combined with patented SGI intellectual property, the Virtu VN200 empowers users to analyze visual models in a centralized environment and then view their simulations anywhere. Results can be viewed locally, or delivered seamlessly to any geographic location and virtually any device. Individual users have access to compute power that can process large data sets with increased accuracy, while teams can view and manipulate models in real-time — powering true, real-time collaboration.

The new system is designed to power applications ranging from stand-alone graphics processing to collaborative environments, says Bob Pette, vice president, Visual Business Unit, SGI. The solution, says Pette, is ideal for consolidating distributed workstations into a single, powerful environment.

"Virtu VN 200 is designed to transform workflow for a wide range of users, including medical personnel, search and rescue teams, product designers and decision support specialists," notes Pette. "The increases it brings in accuracy, efficiency and overall productivity can be enormous."

A Tradition of Visual Innovation

Since SGI shipped its first graphics terminal in 1983, the company has been synonymous with visual innovation. For years, employees of Silicon Graphics, Inc. often were heard repeating a familiar phrase—a reminder of the company's roots: "Graphics is our middle name."

The breakthroughs achieved with SGI visualization technologies have won awards, set new standards in product design, and put researchers on a path to cure deadly diseases. Among them:

• the first digital prototype of the world's largest passenger jet
• the first fully immersive center for war ship design
• eight consecutive years of Academy Award-winning special effects
• the first atomic-level simulation of a complete, functioning organism
• the industry's first 64-bit gaming system with Nintendo
• the world's first virtual reality gaming center

The SGI Virtu family continues this tradition, bringing the wealth of patented SGI visualization technology to HPC and commercial business environments. This technology has been developed, enhanced and field-proven in more than 700 HPC visualization environments.

The Virtu family will extend SGI's history of designing and delivering environments that provide immersive visualization for real-time decision support, combat training, battlefield simulation, media rendering and display, computational steering and product design. Every offering within the SGI Virtu family will be powered by the company's advanced visualization technologies.

"For 25 years SGI has been a leader in performance visualization," notes Ewald, "and the Virtu VN200 is the first in a series of new solutions that reaffirm our leadership in this market."

The Answer to Today's Visualization Challenges

The SGI Virtu VN200 integrates hardware, software and services into a high-density, highly scalable visualization solution for performance graphics environments. The new solution is designed to add visualization capabilities to the full line of SGI® Altix®, Altix® XE and Altix® ICE systems.

Factory-integrated and available as a modular cluster node, the Virtu VN200 features the latest generation of NVIDIA Quadro® FX visual computing technology. SGI and NVIDIA are collaborating on visualization technologies to power SGI advanced visualization capabilities for use in future SGI Virtu family solutions.

SGI Virtu VN200 can either be integrated into a compute cluster environment or as part of custom visualization systems and consulting services provided by SGI Professional Services. With consultants averaging more than 20 years of experience in addressing the data visualization needs of HPC users, SGI Professional Services implements world-class display and remote visualization solutions for some of the world's most demanding customers.

Ewald believes the new Virtu family will trigger far broader use of visualization, enabling any data-rich environment (and any user in any location) to see and interact with information presented in its most intuitive form.

"As the world embraces 3D visualization and even more powerful virtual reality environments," says Ewald, "expect to see SGI lead in turning the virtual world into reality."

The new SGI Virtu VN200 is available today. Visit www.sgi.com/products/visualization for more information.