Affordable--Bringing Advanced Visualization to Your Desk
The Silicon Graphics® Onyx4™ UltimateVision™ family transforms your workflow and productivity at affordable price points. With price/performance improvements of up to 40 times that of previous generations, visualization power previously only accessible to major facilities can now be routinely deployed to companies and small labs, accelerating time to market. Onyx4 brings advanced visual computing within the reach of individuals and small teams traditionally limited to workstation or PC solutions, delivering an affordable competitive edge.
Proven Capability--Improving Productivity
Boundaries disappear as 32 tightly coupled best-of-class graphics processors focus on a single problem. The Onyx4 UltimateVision family combines the power of the unique SGI® high-bandwidth, scalable, shared-memory architecture with best-of-breed, industry-standard, graphics components. These systems will enable you to visualize larger data sets with greater complexity at higher interactivity, all with configurations to empower individuals, transform team productivity, and tackle the most extreme problems.
Onyx4 UltimateVision solutions are based on the proven capabilities of the IRIX® operating system and the award-winning SGI® NUMAflex® architecture, which provides independent scaling for all of the major system components including CPU, memory, storage, I/O, and graphics. As you add these components, Onyx4 automatically scales bandwidth, maintaining a balanced system and transparently maximizing application throughput and performance for any size problem.
Powerful Features--Enabling New Insights
In addition to outstanding price/performance, the Onyx4 UltimateVision family delivers powerful visualization features that radically improve interactivity and insight. Rendering features--including floating-point precision, programmable shaders, multiple textures per pass, and anisotropic filtering--create a fundamental shift in how visualization problems can be solved. For example, techniques using programmable shading for dynamic shadows, highly realistic materials, and self-animating objects make real-time cinematic-quality scenes feasible.
Configurations to Meet Your Needs--Maximizing Your Investment
Targeted at all users from individuals to team rooms to extreme problems in immersive environments, the Onyx4 UltimateVision family is available at price points and in form factors specifically designed to fit your visualization needs. For example, you can get Onyx® family-class visualization power starting with 2 CPUs and 2 graphics processors in a system that slips under your desk at prices you can afford. The compact deskside configuration that scales up to 8 graphics processors and 16 CPUs will help transform your team productivity. And the high-end configuration scales up to 32 graphics processors and 64 CPUs in order to effortlessly roam terabytes of data and solve your most extreme visualization challenges.
Diverse Operating Modes--Getting the Most out of Your System
Because it integrates scalable graphics, high-performance computing, and storage capabilities, the Onyx4 UltimateVision system can easily play multiple roles within your organization as demands change. Some of the many roles it can play simultaneously or separately are:
- A single user's ultimate system
- An interactive multiuser system, either local or through the SGI Visual Area Network
- A single-purpose visualization system using all of the system resources
- The driving force in an SGI® Reality Center® facility
- A behind-the-scenes storage server
- A powerful computational server performing rapid overnight analysis
Screen image courtesy of Tripos, Inc.
