The Graphics Are Back in Silicon Graphics - Virtu and VUE

SGI's RemoteVUE technology within the VUE software suite seem to me to be a continuation of its return to form after market decline, bankruptcy, delisting from the NYSE, and leaving its commmon shares stockholders holding worthless paper certificates after a reverse stock-split scheme in the first years of the 21st century. After this craziness, SGIT got back into form in 2006 by developing Virtu--and abandoning its obsession with high-performance computing.

Virtu was announced in April of 2008 as a computer product line focused on advanced visualization--what got it going to high places in the first place. The Virtu workstations were put on the market to start replacing the SGI Fuel, Tezro, and SGI Prism workstations that got discontinued back in 2006.

SGI's Virtus give you a rack--mounted server configuration called the Virtu VN200 along with configurations, which are selected out of the Virtu VS series--a new branding placed upon an older system from BOXX Technologies which was based on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon AMD Opteron processors and Nvidia Quadro graphics chipsets. They operated and facilitated Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and the Windows Compute Cluster.

According to SGI CEO Robert "Bo" Ewald, "Visualization does more than help our customers solve their toughest problems: it opens their eyes to what's possible." Virtu was created to faciliate this philosophy and make it the everyday reality.

The Virtu VN200, which was the company's first offering in this new 2008 line of HPC applications, was designed to bring a new level of flexibility, accuracy, and sheer power to end-users who have been stymied by the modern world's large data sets--they need, and SGI set out to provide to them, data-intensive environments that are coupled to intense visualization.

SGI poured some of its finest patented technology into the Virtu VN200. Visual models can be analyzed in a centralized environment, but then the sims can be viewed anywhere--locally, or remotely in any other geographic location, and with PDA, laptop/notebook, PC, mainframe workstation, even graphics-enabling cell phone. Now, the large data sets aren't daunting, they can be processed with amazing speed and manipulated individually or collaboratively in real-time.

This is one fine, seamless integration of hardware, software, and applications into this release. According to Bob Pette, the vice president of the Visual Business Unit for SGI, "Virtu VN 200 is designed to transform workflow for a wide range of users, including medical personnel, search and rescue teams, product designers and decision support specialists. The increases it brings in accuracy, efficiency and overall productivity can be enormous."

Nuff said already.