TeraGrid ‘08 gallery showcases the beauty of scientific 3D visualization

The 3D Digital Visualization Gallery from the June TeraGrid ‘08 conference in Las Vegas highlights a wide variety of scientific and engineering domains in computational science. The gallery of static images and QuickTime movies showcases the “Beauty of Science” with simulations ranging from seismic activity and volume rendering to superovae and toroidal magnetic fields. All of the imagery was created from science and engineering results related to some aspect of the TeraGrid. The TeraGrid, sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, provide high-performance network connections and resources to handle massive datasets in science and engineering.

The growing demand for smaller, less power hungry multicore GPUs

With CPUs there was a demand for more power in smaller and less power hungry packages.  The led to the dual core (now quad and eight core) systems. The path will be the same for GPUs - smaller and less power hungry, integrated together.

CrossFire (Radeon) and SLI (GeForce) are solutions for combining multiple GPUs to share the work load when rendering a 3D scene.  The technology is fundamentally simple. Each GPU fully renders the parts of the screen for which it is responsible (be it a whole frame in AFR, the top or bottom half of a screen, or alternating tiles). These results are then combined and output to the screen. The advantages are typically faster rendering at high resolutions, improved anti-aliasing, or an increase in the minimum frame rates in games (See Tom’s Hardware for details)

While these solutions are viable for the games and CAD software that supports them,  they do not scale linearly beyond two GPUs. AMD is supposedly reportedly working on direct GPU to GPU communication hardware in the new multi-GPU solution known as R700.  But how that will work or scale, as well as whether it will include FireGL accelerators, is not yet known.

There are several other interesting solutions in both hardware and software.

On the hardware side of things, LucidLogix Technologies just announced development of a chip that directs portions of a 3D rendering task to particular GPUs that have spare cycles.  What makes this interesting is that you should achieve near-linear performance increases as you add more GPUs.  The pre-processing chip will work with both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Several smaller, lower-power, lower-performance GPUs may end up providing bigger bang for the buck then larger, energy hungry GPUs

For OpenGL visualization software, Equalizer offers an API for parallel rendering techniques. With this toolkit, one or more OpenGL rendering threads execute in parallel to the application thread, providing scalable performance for OpenGL-based rendering on multicore architectures.

Regardless of the the particular solution, multi-GPUs is certainly the wave of the future for professional 3D rendering. 

BMW Gina - a re-interpretation of familiar functionality and structure

BMW's new GINA concept car offers incredibly complex design by incorporating a lightweight, durable, flexible, cloth skin pulled taut around a frame of aluminum and carbon fiber wires. Electro-hydraulic controls can actually move and change shape of the car beneath the fabric skin to adjust for current conditions such as speed and weather. The most striking example are the headlights. When the headlights are not active, they are smoothly hidden under the fabric skin. When the driver turns on the lights, the fabric "blinks" opens and reveals the BMW head-lights. Even the interior is skinned with flexible, Neoprene, only revealing the dash components that are needed.

Check out the sculptural aesthetics of the convex-concave elements in this video. Would be interesting to see the original CAD.

PDF becomes an ISO standard but what about the PRC CAD format?

Last week the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)  issued a press release that PDF v1.7 has become an official ISO standard.  This is a good thing as PDF is pretty much the de facto standard for sharing information in a wide range of industries, including CAD. ISO standardization is particularly attractive to governments and large corporate customers.  In the CAD realm, Acrobat 8 3D and Acrobat 9 Extended both offer the capability to open and convert pretty much any 2D or 3D CAD format into a manipulable PDF at a fraction of the original file size.  This makes 3D PDF a suitable view-only solution for review/markup or even a way to distribute the precise geometry with reasonable security. Hardware acceleration with pixel shader support for manipulating the 3D PDFs in real-time is supported via DirectX.

The magic of the high-compression ratios (e.g. 100 to 1), exact geometry and complex assemblies arises from the PRC file format that is part of 3D PDFs.  So now the question is:  does the ISO PDF spec actually include the PRC format?  Simple answer: No.  The ISO document references the U3D (ECMA standard) and PRC formats, but does not include the detailed specification within the standard. Like references to JPEG , ICC profiles, or OpenType fonts, these specifications remain the province of other organizations and in the case of PRC, the exclusive province of Adobe.

Tech specs alone don’t tell the full story - consumer vs workstation accelerators

If you just look at the tech specs of the top of the line $299 Radeon HD 4870 consumer card and try to compare them to something like the mid-range $1,099 FireGL V770 workstation accelerator you might be a little perplexed.  On paper it hard to see the differences clearly.  Both offer 512MB of memory, PCI Express, Direct X 10.1 with full Shader Model 4.0 support, DisplayPort, dual-link DVI supporting up to 30-bit digital displays at 2560x1600 . The Radeon also has 800 stream processors vs the FireGL with 320 processors. And the Radeon has a bunch of support for audio control to boot!

So is the difference between the midrange workstation graphics accelerator and the high end consumer card, just a lot of marketing hype. Are you just paying a premium to have the words “professional” and “workstation” in the marketing literature?

It turns out its a little more complicated then just the raw specs. Gamer cards push game graphics around fast. This often means high memory bandwidth for texturing, fast full screen anti-aliasing, and fast shader performance. Workstation cards typically are better at line-antialiasing, clip planes, an order of magnitude better with high polygon count work, much better working with mutiple windows or overlays, and are highly optimized and tuned for OpenGL performance. (The vast majority of modeling, CAD, and high-end visualization applications opt for OpenGL rather than DirectX, the latter being the common API for gaming-level graphics on the desktop [but not mobile].)

High end gaming cards focus on pure speed (where close approximation is sufficient)  while high-end workstation cards specialize in extreme accuracy and precision. They are incredibly accurate with FSAA and sub-pixel precision. Workstation graphic cards also have other features such as overlay plane support, multiple clipping planes, many layers of transparency, application performance optimization auto-detect, 3D stereoscopy, and full support for OpenGL (currently 2.1, but 3.0 when it is released).

Workstation cards also include technical support (i.e. you can actually get a trained workstation SE to take your call) and importantly, the accelerators stay on the market and are supported (including parts and replacement) for at least 3 years.

Finally the FireGL drivers are ISV certified, meaning that independent software vendors like Dassault, Bentley, SolidWorks and Autodesk certify on a quarterly basis, that the drivers perform well with specific versions of their programs. Certification is a massive multi-stage process and ensures accuracy for mission critical projects. It also yields substantial performance benefits (e.g. FireGL driver technical collaboration and certification with Dassault in 2007 resulted in 10-fold performance improvements in CATIA v5).

Oops - one more:  FireGL drivers support Linux, as well as Windows XP/Vista in 32 & 64 bit flavors. (A 33% SPECviewperf 10 boost under Linux was recently announced.)

While the gaming market does get the vast majority of the press and discussion online, the workstation market is equally as important to engineering, visualization and design companies. The general take away is that a solid general purpose / gaming card like the Radeon HD 4870, will usually be good enough for most hobbyist 3D animators/illustrators and CAD tinkerers.  But when you get into professional CAD work with millions of polygons and rigorous standards for precision, high end video fx, medical visualization where detail means life or death, or you work in a corporation where reliability and support are required, workstation accelerators more than pay for themselves.

Advances in real time medical visualization using the GPU

I was doing a little research for a project on medical visualization when I came across a video and presentation about using the GPU for real-time medical visualization. The PDF presentation covers combining isosurface extraction and direct volume rendering to create a demo for the Visible Human project. 

But it is the video that is totally impressive. It demonstrates using MRI and CT Scan data, letting the user manipulate the views and slices, then creates complex iso-surfaces to visualize various tissues such as bone, muscle and skin. (note: if you have a current FireGL accelerator and Vista you can actually run the application demo!).

 

The second coming of workstation graphic accelerators - CAD vendors take the lead

A story on CGW by Alex Herrera, author of the “JPR Workstation Report” proposes that the market for workstation graphics cards is about to go through a significant new wave of growth.  It’s not just a matter of a rapid growth in the number of professional users for CAD, DCC, medical imaging, etc.  It is that existing workstation users who previously used non-workstation class GPUs are now upgrading to FireGLs and Quadros. In particular, AutoCAD users.

AutoCAD users have traditionally not been buyers of professional workstation graphics cards.  But Autodesk, noting the significantly fewer support issues (per user) for tested, certified professional workstation accelerators (e.g. FireGL) than the consumer versions (e.g. Radeon), is upping the the base-level hardware requirements for AutoCAD 2007. To receive support for AutoCAD 2007, AutoCAD 2008, or AutoCAD 2009, users must be using a system with “workstation-class graphics cards with 128mb or greater.”

As Herrera points out,  AutoCAD users will have two choices: upgrade their existing system with a workstation-caliber graphics accelerator (i.e.  FireGL or Quadro FX ), or choose a workstation accelerator when ordering their next computer. Given over 4 million user of full versions of AutoCAD, even a relatively small migration to workstation class accelerators will mean a big rise in unit volume over the next few years.

Given that it is support and performance costs driving Autodesk, it would not be surprising to see other CAD vendors raising their minimum requirements as well. Certification of accelerators ensures support for real-time 3D shading, shadows, and smooth-line display features, hardware acceleration in 2D,  and overall reduced problems during use.  Support for OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL 3.0, including advanced features like stereo 3D will further accelerate the requirement.  All the while, the prices of workstation accelerators keeps coming down.

Better performance with less effort - an acceptable challenge to my geek cred

Hey - I'm as geeky as the next guy, but configuring my GPU to perform at its best for each individual application, is not something I want to do. While GPUs out-of-the-box do a good job of accelerating intensive 3D visualization and rendering overall, specific application performance ultimately depends on how well the graphics driver is tweaked to match the requirements of the application being used. Manually configuring these "optimzations" is not something that most 3D graphics or CAD pros want to take on.

Providing a library of selectable pre-defined/pre-optimzed graphics profiles helps to solve this problem. The graphics driver ships with specific settings that will optimally configure the driver for a given application. The tedious option is for the end user to select the best profile when they launch an application.

A more "user-friendly" approach is to let the graphics driver automatically detect what application is launched and then select the profile that provides optimal performance. This becomes even more interesting in the case where the user is running multiple applications simultaneously and the graphics driver automatically swtiches profiles "on-the-fly to give the best performance to each application that is in the foreground.

Automatic Application Detection and Configuration (AutoDetect) on the FireGL line does exactly this. It can recognize the application that is in the foreground window and on-the-fly, reconfigures the GPU to provide the best combination of features for optimal performance in that application. The user gets top notch acceleration, lighting and shading, without having to pay attention to the GPU.

It may not make me feel quite as manly to let the driver do all of the tweaking, but since I do most of my work from my home office, I guess I don't need to impress anyone. Better that I get more work done with better quality, faster. I will find other ways to demonstrate my geek credibility.

A 3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica

“Guernica” is the title of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural inspired by the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi air force during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, in which roughly 1600 people were killed. I saw this cubist-style painting when I visited Madrid in March of 2008.  It is a haunting, muted, mostly black and white painting that depicts the suffering and brutality of war.

Then this month, I came across German artist Lena Gieseke and her “3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica”.  It provides an unique and stunning perspective for viewing the painting in 3D. Definitely check out the Maya-rendered movie which takes you through the painting.