Cost of visualisation now slashed by 80%

The cost of serious engineering design workstations designed for visualisation of the most complex systems has just fallen from £150,000 to just £32,000. That’s the astonishing entry level list price for Silicon Graphics’ Silicon Onyx4 Ultimate Vision with two CPUs and two graphics outputs, capable on a desktop of performing the sorts of analyses and 3D stereo visualisations that would have required a full blown Reality Centre just a short time ago. SGI’s Professor David Hughes told MCS that the price cut comes from using commodity ATI graphics boards, but implementing them such that they can run in parallel graphics pipelines. The system is highly modular, and can be built up to configurations with 64 microprocessors and 32 graphic pipelines, and then taken apart again. The smaller units are aimed at single power users such as those with complex problems in FEA (finite element analysis), CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and stochastic multiple crash analyses. Expected uses include modelling car interiors at such granularity that materials appear real, and visualisations of whole cars, with details down to single welds. SGI sales director Tim Butchart mentioned research by Daimler Chrysler aimed at developing virtual reality systems that could put individual customers in virtual new cars they were interested in buying. The aim would be to allow them to see if their proposed purchase fitted the image they wished to have of themselves at the wheel. Applying similar technology to ladies’ fashions, so they can see how they would look in dresses before they are made, is, apparently, further away. MCS, aware of SGI’s long connections with the fashion industry, is, however, not surprised to learn that the company is actively working on the problem using a technique called ‘vertex shading’ to reproduce the flow of draped fabrics on a moving model.