Sun Visualization System

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Sun Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by Sun Microsystems in January 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers, Solaris, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and Sun Grid Engine. The Sun Visualization System software was based on several open source technologies: Chromium to perform distributed 3D rendering, VirtualGL to re-route 3D rendering jobs to arbitrary graphics devices, and TurboVNC to deliver the rendered 3D images to a client or clients. Sun sponsored and/or contributed changes back to these projects throughout the life of the Sun Visualization System.

Sun Microsystems defunct computer hardware and software company which was based in Santa Clara

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Solaris (operating system) Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems

Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. In 2010, after the Sun acquisition by Oracle, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.

Sun Ray

The Sun Ray from Oracle is a stateless thin client solution aimed at corporate environments, originally introduced by Sun Microsystems in September 1999 and discontinued by Oracle in 2014. It featured a smart card reader and several models featured an integrated flat panel display.

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In January 2009, The VirtualGL project reported that it was no longer being sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and in April 2009, Sun announced that it was discontinuing the Sun Shared Visualization and Sun Scalable Visualization products. Customers were able to order the products through July 31, 2009, and service and support was provided until October 2014.

Main hardware components

Sun Fire

Sun Fire is a series of server computers introduced in 2001 by Sun Microsystems. The Sun Fire branding coincided with the introduction of the UltraSPARC III processor, superseding the UltraSPARC II-based Sun Enterprise series. In 2003, Sun broadened the Sun Fire brand, introducing Sun Fire servers using the Intel Xeon processor. In 2004, these early Intel Xeon models were superseded by models powered by AMD Opteron processors. Also in 2004, Sun introduced Sun Fire servers powered by the UltraSPARC IV dual-core processor. In 2007, Sun again introduced Intel Xeon Sun Fire servers, while continuing to offer the AMD Opteron versions as well.

Nvidia Quadro Nvidias brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional CAD, CGI, and DCC applications

Nvidia Quadro is Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine learning.

The Nvidia Quadro Plex is an external graphics processing unit (Visual Computing System) designed for large-scale 3D visualizations. The system consists of a box containing a pair of high-end Nvidia Quadro graphics cards featuring a variety of external video connectors. A special PCI Express card is installed in the host computer, and the two are connected by VHDCI cables.

Software

ParaView open source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization

ParaView is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive frame rates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) libraries. ParaView is an application designed for data parallelism on shared-memory or distributed-memory multicomputers and clusters. It can also be run as a single-computer application.

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing standard designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computing architectures. The standard defines the syntax and semantics of a core of library routines useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in C, C++, and Fortran. There are several well-tested and efficient implementations of MPI, many of which are open-source or in the public domain. These fostered the development of a parallel software industry, and encouraged development of portable and scalable large-scale parallel applications.

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Silicon Graphics former American company

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California in November 1981 by Jim Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time.

Workstation high-end computer designed for technical or scientific applications

A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has also been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the group of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT and IBM which opened the door for the 3D graphics animation revolution of the late 1990s.

The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's "GeForce" product-line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor by increasing the number of fixed pixel pipelines, offloading host geometry calculations to a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, and adding hardware motion-compensation for MPEG-2 video. It offered a notably large leap in 3D gaming performance and was the first fully Direct3D 7-compliant 3D accelerator.

Virtual Network Computing

In computing, Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop-sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical-screen updates back in the other direction, over a network.

Xinerama

Xinerama is an extension to the X Window System that enables X applications and window managers to use two or more physical displays as one large virtual display.

Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE or GRD, was a grid computing computer cluster software system, acquired as part of a purchase of Gridware, then improved and supported by Sun Microsystems and later Oracle. There have been open source versions and multiple commercial versions of this technology, initially from Sun, later from Oracle and then from Univa Corporation.

Xgl display server

Xgl is an obsolete display server implementation supporting the X Window System protocol designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. The project was started by David Reveman of Novell and first released on January 2, 2006. It was removed from the X.org server in favor of AIGLX on June 12, 2008.

Brian Paul American software programmer

Brian E. Paul is a computer programmer who originally wrote and maintained the source code for the open source Mesa graphics library until 2012 and is still active in the project. Paul began programming initial source code in August 1993. Mesa is a free software/open source graphics library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platforms. Though Mesa is not an officially licensed OpenGL implementation, the structure, syntax and semantics of the API is that of OpenGL.

VirtualGL is an open source program that redirects the 3D rendering commands from Unix and Linux OpenGL applications to 3D accelerator hardware in a dedicated server and displays the rendered output interactively to a thin client located elsewhere on the network.

CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model

CUDA is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by Nvidia. It allows software developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing — an approach termed GPGPU. The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for the execution of compute kernels.

Video wall

A video wall is a special multi-monitor setup that consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include LCD panels, Direct View LED arrays, blended projection screens, Laser Phosphor Displays, and rear projection cubes.

VirtualBox open-source x86 virtualization application

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor for x86 computers currently being developed by Oracle Corporation. Developed initially by Innotek GmbH, it was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 which was in turn acquired by Oracle in 2010.

In computing, the term remote desktop refers to a software or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely on one system, while being displayed on a separate client device. Remote desktop applications have varying features. Some allow attaching to an existing user's session and "remote controlling", either displaying the remote control session or blanking the screen. Taking over a desktop remotely is a form of remote administration.

ThinLinc

ThinLinc is a cross-platform remote desktop server developed by Cendio AB. The server software and the users' main desktops run on Linux, but Windows applications and desktops can be accessed using the included integration with Remote Desktop Services or Citrix XenApp, or third-party programs such as Wine, Codeweavers CrossOver, or desktop virtualization software. Clients are available for Linux, Windows, OS X, and a number of thin clients.

Microsoft RemoteFX is a Microsoft brand name that covers a set of technologies that enhance visual experience of the Microsoft-developed remote display protocol Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). RemoteFX was first introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and is based on intellectual property that Microsoft acquired and continued to develop since acquiring Calista Technologies. It is a part of the overall Remote Desktop Services workload.