CEI Uses Commodity Clusters at LLNL to Shatter World Graphics Rendering Record

CEI, a leading provider of engineering and scientific graphics software, shattered the previous record for graphics rendering speed during tests last week at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). CEI engineers and Dale Southard of LLNL conducted the tests on a Linux visualization cluster used to support National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) missions.

CEI's parallel rendering compositor achieved a speed of 3.17 billion polygons per second using 76 standard dual-processor PCs running on a high-performance networking system. The scene used for testing contained 684 million triangles and ran at a rate of 4.6 frames per second.

The results of the LLNL tests more than double the 1.5 billion polygons per second speed reported this past March in tests by another DOE laboratory on a 128-node Linux cluster. Those tests used a 473-million triangle model that ran at a rate of 3.2 frames per second.

CEI's record results have major implications for engineers and scientists who increasingly desire to visualize computational problems that require very high-fidelity data, such as hydrodynamics, large-scale structural analysis, and airflow testing using finely detailed automotive and aerospace models.

"We've demonstrated technology that enables commercial software to run on clusters of inexpensive, commodity visualization hardware, interactively handling visualization problems so large that they could not be efficiently processed with traditional supercomputers," says Randall Frank, senior developer for CEI. "This is important due to the rapid increase in the size of simulation models, coupled with the need for interactivity."

CEI's high-efficiency parallel compositor is an enhancement to the company's SoS (server of server) capability that is already in use worldwide to visualize some of the world's largest simulation problems. The compositor will be a part of CEI's new DR (distributed rendering) technology that will be incorporated this fall into the company's EnSight, EnLiten and EnVideo visualization products.

CEI's DR line of systems will be demonstrated at Supercomputing 2005 this November in Seattle, and at CEIViz '06 in February in Orlando.

About CEI

CEI (www.ensight.com) offers a complete suite of tools for engineering and scientific visualization, from meshing to plotting to animations that can be run on the most advanced VR displays. The company has corporate headquarters in Apex, N.C., and authorized distributors around the world. In addition to software products, CEI provides consulting services to engineers and scientists from organizations that need to visualize computational results for research, product design or product refinement.

Related Articles

• Avnet Partner Solutions Unveils EPIC Program to Support Novell's SUSE Linux on IBM
  Thursday, 25 August 2005



• LQ ISO Linux Download Site Reaches One Million Downloads
  Thursday, 25 August 2005



• O'Reilly Releases "Linux in a Nutshell, Fifth Edition"
  Wednesday, 24 August 2005



• Evolving Solutions Awarded Platinum Novell Partnership Status - Positions to Meet Growing LINUX Open Source Needs
  Friday, 19 August 2005



• Novell and CS2C Sign Agreement to Deliver Linux Offerings for China
  Tuesday, 16 August 2005



• World's Highest Performance Linux Cluster Interconnect Now Shipping in Volume: First Implemented at University of California
  Sunday, 14 August 2005



• Baldor Electric Consolidates Global Implementation of SAP(R) Solutions Onto IBM Mainframe Running Linux
  Friday, 12 August 2005



• IBM Teams With Red Hat to Make IBM Workplace Services Express Software Available to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Customers
  Thursday, 11 August 2005



• LinuxWorld 2005: World's Highest Performance Linux Cluster Interconnect Now Shipping in Volume
  Thursday, 11 August 2005



• The DCC Alliance Launches to Assemble a Common, Standards-Based Core for Debian-Based Linux Distributions
  Wednesday, 10 August 2005



• Versora Announces Progression Desktop 2.0 Offering Automated Windows to Linux, Linux to Linux and Windows to Windows
  Tuesday, 9 August 2005



• iAnywhere Customer Wins Highlight Demand for SQL Anywhere on Linux
  Monday, 8 August 2005



• CheckStatus.net Switches To Open Source And Linux
  Sunday, 7 August 2005



• Teryl and Linux Report Auger Drilling Program Commences on the Fish Creek Property, Fairbanks, Alaska
  Saturday, 6 August 2005



• Dot Hill Qualifies Its Storage Array and Management Software on Stratus NEBS Compliant Fault-Tolerant Linux Servers
  Saturday, 6 August 2005

Recent Issues