Visualization Machines

[Keith Refson]

In article <9811 at hubcap.clemson.edu> malcolm at Apple.COM (Malcolm Slaney) writes:
>What are good machines for scientific visualizations?  We have a Cray but
>I'm looking around for other machines that can do my work nearly as fast.
>
>vectorization.  I want to be able to compute something and then display the
>result very quickly (20 frames per second) on a monitor.
>
>I guess the numbers that are important to me are >100 MFlops of peak 
>performance and > 25 Mega-pixels per second output rate (at the same time.)
>
>Should I think about Convex?  What about the new Connection Machine?  Machines
>like the DAP and the MassPar seem to be too hard to program (I want to do
>new research in hearing, not algorithm development.)
 
As far as I know neither the Convex or DAP are visualization machines.

I think you should consider machines from Stardent Computer Ltd
(formerly Stellar and Ardent).  They combine the sort of performance
you seem to be seeking with the visualization.  Our Stardent GS2000
can run my vector-parallel codes at 27% of the speed of a CRAY XMP
(single processor) and do geometry rendering of complex molecular
models at > 12 frames/sec.  Codes vectorized for the cray should port
easily, and the vectorizing fortran and C compilers are quite good.

The greatest advantage I find of Stardent is their AVS visualization
program which means that you can do vizualization without any graphics
programming. At all.  You should be able to integrate your codes with
AVS with a small programming effort to get the computatational module
to deliver data for immediate visualization.

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