3D Visualisation and Graphics Programming Interest Group

After decades of successful innovation, great products and great influence on the visualisation- and high performance computing market, books seems to be closing for the former giant SGI. As part of a deal with Freemont-based Rackable Systems, the remains of the company has been sold for USD 25 million. The story does not tell the future of the remaining 1200 employees of SGI, but given that Rackable Systems is a significantly smaller company (approx. 300 employees), it seems unlikly for them to absorb the workforce.

SGI has made some remarkable innovations over the years, including software such as OpenGL, OpenGL Inventor, OpenGL Performer, graphics engines such as RealityEngine, InfiniteReality(2 and 3), and products such as the mighty Indy and O2 workstations, Origin and Onyx supercomputers and during the later years the Altix linux-based computing powerhouse.

Its is sad that the company is gone, and there is indeed and opening in the market looking for a company to fill SGIs shoes in delivering great innovations that bring the market forward into new paradigms.

OhGizmo reports about the new giant outdoor LED display from Mitsubishi Diamond Vision LED. Assembled out of 8,601,600 LEDs providing HD resolution it can also display up to 4 video feeds at one time, and do picture-in-picture.

[Via: Wired Gadgets]

Khronos Group has launched a new initiative to bring 3D content to the people through the web browser. The increased performance of Javascript is the key driver for the fast pace in this area that we are witnessing. According to Vladimir Vukićević, who has been involved in the Canvas 3D experimentation, it is go time for 3D on the web.

Related to graphics is the idea of using the power of graphics hardware for tasks beyond graphics (GPGPU). OpenCL (maintained by Khronos Group) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors.

A demo of OpenCL was recently announced by Havok and AMD. More information in the following article at Engadget.com.

Vincent Scheib has posted an interesting article, comparing the architecture of different systems ranging from a traditional PC to Nvidia CUDA and gaming consoles such as the ever popular Wii, the Xbox360 and PS3. More on his blog Beautiful Pixels.