AUSTIN, TX-Ranger, a key resource on the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid and the most powerful academic system in the world, is now even more attractive to researchers who depend on it to do advanced scientific analysis. With the integration of Spur, they now have the ability to visualize their data immediately.

“Spur is the first-of-its-kind visualization resource to be tightly integrated with a high performance computing system (HPC) of Ranger’s magnitude,” Paul Navratil, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) visualization scientist, said. “Each Spur node is more than a researcher will have on their desktop or laptop, and the remote visualization aspect allows the researcher to perform his or her analysis on a powerful machine from a remote location. Researchers no longer have to come to the graphics resources. We’re bringing the graphics resources to them.”

Spur, based on the Sun Visualization System, provides tight integration with Ranger, remote visualization access, and powerful visualization and data analysis capabilities directly to TeraGrid and Texas Higher Education research communities.

Based on state-of-the-art technology from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, and NVIDIA, Spur began full production last October, and replaces the Maverick system as TACC’s primary remote visualization resource.