Sun has released the Sun FireTM V880z server visualization system to market, which combines the Sun FireTM V880 server and the SunTM XVR-4000 graphics accelerator with the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE) to provide a high-end visualization system in a compact footprint at a price that is less than half that of the nearest competitor, the SGI Infinite-Reality system.

Sun is targeting users in the automotive, aerospace design, oil and gas exploration and medical research fields with this system designed to power high-end 3-D applications at an aggressive price point. A number of organizations in these fields have adopted the system, including the EDS Virtual Reality Center in Troy, MI; the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center, and IDC, whose research manager, Kara Yokley, of Workstations and High-Performance Systems, commented, "The new Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerator creates new high-end market opportunities for Sun. The new system expands Sun's graphics offerings from entry-level 3-D graphics to personal visualization and now workgroup visualization servers. We believe this technology will be particularly interesting for departmental usage and should expand Sun's addressable market opportunity in such industries as oil and gas, automotive, and aerospace."

Some of the key features of the Sun Fire V880z visualization system are:

• Superior Rendering Performance and Fast Interconnect: More than 60 million fully lit, textured, anti-aliased triangles per second result from the graphics interconnect bandwidth, which uses the SunTM Fireplane interconnect, at a rate greater than 2 GB per second.

• Anti-aliasing Filters: Jaggies in 3-D objects are eliminated by the four-filter chips dedicated to sampling frame buffer memory data to implement anti-aliasing, and pixel-to-subpixel ratios, plus 16-way stochastic sampling, deliver images of higher quality than those typical of one-box filters.

• Performance Scalability without Programming Complexity: A single-pipe interface to SunTM OpenGLR for SolarisTM applications minimizes programming complexities.

• FrameLock and GenLock Capabilities: Synchronized multi-display environments, as well as synchronization to an external video source, are available.

• S-Video Support: Enables recording to NTSC/PAL recording devices.

• Dynamic Video Resizing: Enables simultaneous recording on an NTSC or PAL recording device of high-resolution displays.

• Multiple Display Capabilities: With dual Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerators, a Sun Fire V880 server-based visualization system can drive up to four 1920 x 1200 displays or four 1280 x 1024 stereo displays.

The base configuration of the Sun Fire V880z visualization system includes a single Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerator, two 900 MHz UltraSPARCR III processors, 4 GB memory, and six 73 GB FCAL disk drives.

For more information, go to:

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v880z/index.html [...read more...]

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