Eyes wide open

SGI this month launched a line of visualization systems that can handle terabyte-size data sets using off-the-shelf technologies and open-source software. The Silicon Graphics Prism combines the company's advanced graphics capabilities with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating system to put high-end visual computing tools in the hands of a wide variety of government users.

Officials at the Santa Clara, Calif., company said the ability to visualize large amounts of data has become widespread. Still, researchers and engineers who need maximum visualization power can scale the Prism to 16 graphic pipelines and 512 processors.