Computer Graphics World

February 2009 29 Visualization n n n n more than $100 million. "Typically," says Briggs, "companies will want to start a project, spending just a percentage of the entire project, and get to oil so they can start pumping to support the rest of it." Location is Key Briggs believes visualization is critical but not always practical. He says that even when you have a visualization center on- site, it might not be that practical to use. Visualization centers have to be scheduled, and the data has to be prepared. In reality, he says, "people won't even walk down the damn hall." Briggs continues: "Visualization centers are primarily for blowing the socks off ex- ecutives or for those situations where an entire team wants to look at something." Comparatively, Headwave is seeing a lot more interest in deskside systems. Head- wave's software is based on a massively parallel architecture that enables it to take advantage of GPU clusters. is is one of the first products to take advantage of GP- GPU, or GPU-compute, technology that exploits the hundreds of cores in a GPU (for instance, the ATI R770 processor with its 800 processor cores, or the Nvidia GTX 200 with its 240 cores) to go to work on a much wider variety of number-crunching tasks. In fact, Headwave was one of the first companies to put Tesla, Nvidia's heavy- duty, general-purpose GPU computing solution, to use (see "Digging Deep," Sep- tember 2008). As Briggs notes, in spite of all the im- provements in graphics hardware, one does not just fire up a 3D visualization and start collaborating away. Regardless of the display medium, the content has to be ported to the proper format that is conditioned for dis- play. e work Cruz-Neira is doing at the LITE (Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise) center is somewhat similar to the European model, though most often it is university personnel who are contracting with outside clients to create visualizations. Understandably, Cruz-Neira takes is- sue with arguments that Europe is ahead of the US on the visualization front. She is an impassioned advocate for high-end visu- alization and a one-woman Johnny Apple- seed for the technology. An example of her seed-planting is the $27 million, 70,000- square-foot LITE facility at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette (UL Lafayette), where Cruz-Neira is the executive director and chief scientist. It was built through the cooperation between the state of Louisiana, Lafayette Economic Development Author- ity (LEDA), and the university, and at least one of the major areas of research is oil and gas, in addition to medicine, weather predic- tion, entertainment, and industrial design. e university has long been a regional champion, bringing high-tech practices to an area that has seen its local businesses face several crippling challenges over the de- cades, including the transformation from an agricultural district to one dependent on oil, only to be devastated by the depar- ture of the oil industry from the US, fol- lowed by the long-lasting horrors brought by Hurricane Katrina. e LITE center has three visualization venues that were built with SGI and Chris- tie equipment—a six-sided CAVE with 1400x1050-resolution walls, a 174-seat Reality Center with a 37-foot screen, and a 20-room conference center. e venues are used by the LITE center's partners and clients, as well as by the university, and for demonstration purposes to show local in- dustry what can be done. e systems are powered by SGI Prism systems, each one having 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors and six graphics pipes. LITE also has an immersive collaboration teleconfer- ence room that enables users to work across a high-speed fiber link. Last, but far from least, the center has an SGI Altix 350 super- computer with 352 processors and 8tb of SGI InfiniteStorage SAN humming away in a back room to handle the heavy lifting. It's not just the hardware, though, that makes this possible. Cruz-Neira is able to accomplish what she has because the uni- versity is able to bring its resources to bear on particular problems. Most recently, UL Lafayette announced breakthrough work visualizing 3D data from mammograms to better understand breast cancers, and the center has also done groundbreaking work in weather studies and prediction. Further- more, the LITE center is a tourist attrac- tion of sorts, hosting regular open houses and conferences. Cruz-Neira believes her real work is to help companies build their own visualiza- Increasingly, teams collaborating across thousands of miles need to truly see an object. For instance, they need to see how a material will really look in a finished product.

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