Distance shrinks for researchers

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Silicon Graphics is upgrading its Vizserver software to let remote PC users change supercomputer-generated graphics.

The product already lets commodity PCs display complex graphic models at great distances from the server.

But version 2.0, to be released this year, will let remote users physically change the server data.

SGI scientist Colin Holmes said the seemingly minor improvement would be critical for SGI's scientific and engineering customers who were using high-end graphics servers to collaborate on a global scale.

"By collaboration, we don't mean someone looking at a database or flipping through pages of images.

"This is someone interacting with the data, making suppositions then making changes, and seeing the results immediately generated by the graphics supercomputer."

Holmes said the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping was an example.

Researchers were gathering images of the human brain and sharing them between international sites.

Aligning thousands of images with each another and comparing them statistically could provide insights into the physical effects of conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

" The results can be interpreted only by looking at them because the volumes and the nature of the statistics are of a very high order," said Holmes.

Vizserver works by performing all the visualisation computation on the server.

It then sends a compressed stream to remote PCs.

Users can then zoom, pan, rotate and mark up the image, which is then re-rendered on the server.

New Zealand regional manager Scott Houston said the University of Auckland was using Vizserver as part of its $2 million SGI Onyx 3400 supercomputer system, which was being used for several projects, including mapping the human heart.

Last year, a spate of high-end server sales for aerospace, automotive and scientific customers helped SGI return to profitability after two years of losses.

In the quarter to December 28, SGI returned a net profit of US$37 million ($84 million) on a turnover of US$240 million ($548 million).

This compared with a loss of US$71 million ($162 million) million on revenue of US$326 million ($744 million) in the final quarter of 2000.