SGI® Onyx® Family: The Engine Behind
SGI® Reality CenterTM Facilities
SGI Reality Center facilities are powered by the SGI Onyx family of high-performance visualization systems. Every one of these systems has been designed to drive large-scale, immersive, and multiprojector environments. SGI Onyx family systems are scalable systems that grow with the user's needs, so you buy just the hardware you need to power your Reality Center facility. Reality Center facilities deliver the highly interactive and realistic experiences that are essential to a successful collaborative or immersive session.
Flexibility and Performance for Reality Center Environments
Taking on the world's foremost challenges, speeding up decision cycles, and making decisions based on digital data require high levels of performance and realism. SGI Onyx family systems offer superior performance and unique features such as clip-mapping, texture paging, volume rendering, multistream HDTV video manipulation, multichannel output, and immersion support--features that put you ahead of the competition.
Collaborative sessions often require the use of both single and multipipe applications at the same time, as well as the changing of display configurations and immersive devices. The SGI Onyx family has always delivered these capabilities, making collaborative visualization possible. In fact, all of these demands can be met during a single working session. You can use heterogeneous applications simultaneously or reconfigure the system dynamically for your specific display requirement. With SGI® OpenGL MultipipeTM software, single-pipe applications can be readily run in multiple SGI Reality Center environments.
SGI designed the SGI Onyx family to offer operating modes that keep your system working around the clock, because an idle system diminishes your return on investment. Simultaneously use it as an interactive multiuser workstation, as a visual server, or to drive an SGI Reality Center facility. Then put it to work at nights and on weekends as a compute server to create the data you will analyze during the next business day.
SGI Onyx Family with InfiniteReality® Family Graphics
The unsurpassed visual realism generated by the SGI Onyx family with InfiniteReality family graphics allows you to achieve exceptional dynamic rendering, interactivity, and group collaboration. You can now have the power of the SGI Onyx family with unprecedented modularity to meet the shifting demands of any organization or project. You can scale graphics, CPU, storage, and I/O components independently, allowing you to deploy, upgrade, service, expand, and redeploy your system in every possible dimension. With brick-by-brick modularity, you can build and maintain a system optimally, with a level of flexibility that makes obsolescence almost obsolete. The SGI Onyx family with InfiniteReality family graphics includes:
- SGI® Onyx® 3200 with InfiniteReality family graphics--supports one or two InfiniteReality family graphics pipes, two to eight processors, graphics-to-video output, and high-performance digital media input and output
- SGI® Onyx® 3800-B with InfiniteReality family graphics--supports up to 16 InfiniteReality family graphics pipes, 128 processors, graphics-to-video output, and digital media input and output
- SGI® Onyx® 3900 with InfiniteReality family graphics--supports up to 32 processors and two graphics pipes in a single rack and up to 16 graphics pipes and 128 processors in a single system.
- SGI® Onyx® 300 with InfiniteReality family graphics--supports up to eight InfiniteReality family graphics pipes, 32 processors, and high-definition graphics-to-video output in a compact form factor with low total cost of ownership
SGI Onyx 3000 Series with InfinitePerformanceTM graphics
SGI Onyx 3000 series with InfinitePerformance graphics offers the industry's highest interactive performance and price/performance in a scalable visualization system. These systems are based on 10 years of SGI research and development and combine the modular scalability of the SGI® NUMA® architecture with cost-effective workstation-class graphics and breakthrough scalable graphics compositor technology to deliver up to 141 million triangles per second and 3.8 billion pixels per second to a single display. The combination of graphics power and price/performance enables the deployment of SGI Reality Center installations at all levels of an organization. The SGI Onyx 3000 series with InfinitePerformance graphics includes:
- SGI Onyx 3200 with InfinitePerformance graphics--supports one InfinitePerformance graphics pipe and four to eight processors in a half-height rack form factor.
- SGI Onyx 3800-B with InfinitePerformance graphics--supports up to 8 independent InfinitePerformance graphics pipes, multiple scalable graphics compositors, and 4 to 128 processors; this system delivers the ultimate in interactive performance with extreme display flexibility; for example, each wall in a four-sided SGI Reality Center room would have a dedicated two-way InfinitePerformance graphics pipe (each containing four independent InfinitePerformance graphics pipes and a scalable graphics compositor) to deliver up to 35 million triangles per second, and more than 968 million pixels per second of sustained performance, to each wall in the room.
- SGI Onyx 3900 with InfinitePerformance graphics--supports up to 8 independent InfinitePerformance graphics pipes, multiple scalable graphics compositors, and 4 to 128 processors in a dense, high-performance configuration. A single-rack Onyx 3900 system can drive a three-screen Reality Center with over 100 million polygons per second and 2.7 billion pixels persecond of performance. At other times, this same system can support six individual users and can be used as a 32 CPU supercomputing server.