Sun revs shared visualization software

From Sun’s HPC Watercooler:

Sun’s Shared Visualization software lets organizations share centralized compute and graphics resources. Applications can run in the machine room on a shared server with graphics acceleration, but are operated by users on a variety of clients over the network. This aids collaboration and security as well as lowering total cost of ownership.

This new release adds support for OpenSolaris 2008.11, x86-based Macs running OS/X 10.5 “Leopard,” OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu platforms, improves performance on Solaris systems, and offers additional TurboVNC and Sun Ray image encodings to improve performance. It also includes fixes for application-specific issues.

Sun says the software is free “for evaluation,” but you’ll need to pony up for support. The centerpiece technology is VirtualGL and TurboVNC

VirtualGL is open source middleware which lets any Unix or Linux remote display user run OpenGL applications with full graphics hardware acceleration. OpenGL commands and 3D data are redirected to a graphics accelerator on the application server; only the rendered 3D images are compressed and sent to the client machine, where they appear in the application’s window just as they would when run locally.

…TurboVNC is open source software that allows for collaboration and high-latency network access with visualization applications. TurboVNC, when used with VirtualGL, is the fastest solution for remotely displaying visualization applications across a wide-area network.