CEI announced plans to demonstrate record-setting distributed rendering technologies and new features recently introduced in EnSight 8.2 at the SC06 supercomputing show next week in Tampa, Fla. CEI products and technologies will be on display in booth 500 and in partner booths at the show.

A main attraction at the CEI booth will be the distributed rendering software EnSight DR, the first commercial visualization application that brings the power of parallel processing to the desktop. EnSight DR harnesses off-the-shelf hardware to visualize datasets containing up to billions of polygons. Earlier this year, a Linux Networx LS Visual Supersystem running EnSight DR set a world visualization record, rendering at a rate of 1.5 billion polygons per second.

“EnSight DR is a killer app for those who want to leverage supercomputing-like power on low-cost clusters,” says Kent Misegades, CEI’s president.

Cluster visualization for everyone

SC06 will also mark the first public demos of EnSight 8.2, which has followed the lead of EnSight DR to make cluster rendering more accessible to visualization professionals. The newest version of EnSight removes tedious configuration tasks that users face with other software in cluster environments. Users simply tell EnSight how many servers they will be using for processing and the software automatically decomposes the dataset on the fly and distributes load-balanced work portions to the available servers.

“Version 8.2 makes it easier than ever to take advantage of EnSight’s powerful distributed rendering capabilities,” says Dr. Jeff Jortner, principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories. “CEI has brought parallel processing to the user’s desktop in a completely transparent manner.”

Personalized GUI and greater realism

CEI will also show the new user-defined GUI and 2D texturing features of EnSight 8.2.

The GUI enables users to take advantage of Python scripts to design an interface based on their unique workflow, macros and preferences. New texturing capabilities, including transparency, increase image realism and give users the ability to visualize data in fresh and illuminating ways.

Collaborating with partners

In addition to its own booth, CEI products can be witnessed in the following partner booths at SC06:

Apple, booth 1834, will show EnSight applications on a large 50-megapixel display wall and a CEI engineer will demonstrate new simulation products running on Mac OS X.

HP, booth 1505, will show EnSight's advanced cluster capabilities, including distributed rendering on a multi-channel Panoram PixelBlaster display, enabled by the HP Scalable Visualization Array running on 17 1U graphics servers. HP will also show EnSight with FLUENT on a tightly integrated compute, visualization and storage solution.

Linux Networx, booth 617, will show the record-breaking polygon model processed by EnSight DR on the LS Visual Supersystem, as well as visualization applications spanning aerospace, automotive, manufacturing and energy industries.

About CEI

CEI (www.ensight.com) offers a complete suite of engineering and scientific visualization tools, from meshing to plotting to animation, on all major operating systems. The company’s products can be run on everything from laptops to workstations, clusters and supercomputers, with animations displayed in stereo and in immersive VR. CEI has corporate headquarters in Apex, N.C., and authorized distributors around the world.