Fraunhofer-Institut IAO Accelerates Vehicle Design at Lower Cost With Silicon Graphics Prism System

MUNICH, Germany and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- To increase the level of realism when evaluating virtual vehicles and to accelerate its adoption by industry, scientists at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) have selected the Silicon Graphics Prism(TM) platform from SGI to solve a new class of data and rendering intensive problems never before possible in virtual environments. Using Virtual Drive, physical prototypes become unnecessary and test drives of many different variants can be performed in the very early stages of vehicle design -- reducing costs, accelerating work flows and resulting in more mature products.

The most important criteria for the choice of the Silicon Graphics Prism system was its industry-leading shared memory architecture which gives scientists easy-to-use, flexible high-performance deployment options. The Silicon Graphics Prism system at IAO is equipped with four graphics pipes, eight Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 CPUs and 16GB of main memory. This system will be used to drive a 4-plane CAVE immersive environment that integrates the simulation of vehicle interiors with a classical driving simulator. It will also be used with a Scalable Graphics Compositor to combine the rendering power of all four graphics pipes to deliver a whole new level of scene complexity and realism. The powerful and flexible design of Silicon Graphics Prism platform enables IAO to efficiently press ahead with its industrially oriented research activities in the area of innovative production method development.

Closeness to Reality plus VR Interactivity

"Virtual Drive poses a considerable challenge to the visualization system," explains Matthias Bues, who is responsible for the project on the IAO side. "On one hand, an image quality with highly accurate rendering and high resolution is necessary when we provide a visual of the interior with all details of cushioning and cockpit via fine texturing and shading methods; on the other hand, the visual simulation requires high frame rates in order to provide a smoothly running outside world view to the interactive drive simulation.

Furthermore, using a decisive new approach, the test driver should be able to interact with various virtual steering and control units e.g., for handling communication, air conditioning and other devices during the driving simulation. The Silicon Graphics Prism system will serve as a platform for development of an ambitious VR environment targeted at functional evaluation of virtual vehicle prototypes."

Shared Memory, Single system Image and Scalability

Bues adds, "We decided in favour of the SGI system due to its shared memory architecture and single system image capability and, very importantly, because we think that there will be an increasing number of industrial customers who want to implement this kind of system. The architecture is so attractive that it can enjoy popularity in VR environments at potential project partners. For various purposes, we also deploy a number of cluster based visualization systems, but Silicon Graphics Prism considerably extends our opportunities. On the Silicon Graphics Prism system, we will be able to complete many tasks very quickly, very easily, and in some cases for the first time or with reduced expense."

All resources on the SGI machine are available in a single Linux(R) partition and can access the large, contiguously addressable main memory; even very complex problems can be processed without needing to be fragmented.

"Data sets and models keep growing, the methods become ever more detailed, and the rendering processes more CPU intensive," the IAO scientist explains. "In this context, the shared memory architecture of the SGI system turns out to be a clear advantage in all cases where intensive inter-process communication is essential. This applies to performance, since due to the high bandwidth and low latency of the architecture the traditional bottlenecks inherent in cluster networking are avoided. This is also valid with respect to programming, since inter-process communication is easier to structure and organize and requires less overhead than in distributed memory architectures."

Multiplying Performance with a Scalable Graphics Compositor

The availability of the Scalable Graphics Compositor module was an essential criterion for the decision in favour of the SGI platform. With this hardware option it is possible to bundle the performance of four graphics pipes and feed the rendering result delivered via dynamical load balancing to a single output channel. "This provides additional possibilities and more flexibility for our development work," says Bues. "As an alternative to the cave configuration we can, for example, use the four pipes to perform the visual simulation as a single plane projection with increased scenical complexity. Also, when there is need for very high resolutions in compositing, a hardware solution is just the right thing."

Flexibility -- Planning for the Future

The exemplary flexibility at the disposal of IAO via the Silicon Graphics Prism system is essential, since the Institute intends to use this resource not only for the development of methods and tools for advanced VR applications, but also to provide infrastructure service to internal users and ASP services to external companies. In particular, medium-sized firms which previously had little or no access to visualization and computational resources offered by Silicon Graphics Prism will have the opportunity to exploit the productivity advantages of the IAO environment and even work with the Institute to create pilot projects.

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