With its origins in a leading national research institute, high-performance visualization specialist Scalable Graphics is a company with impeccable technical credentials. Thanks to its close partnership with NVIDIA, Scalable Graphics is using its strong academic background to build a solid commercial future.

Scalable Graphics provides software and services for high performance 3-D visualization and computing. By aggregating the power of multiple graphics processing units (GPUs), its solutions allow customers to visualize bigger data sets at higher frame rates by scaling the performance of 3-D applications. For an industry such as oil and gas, Scalable Graphics’ tailored combination of hardware, middleware, applications and services offers an extremely valuable 3-D performance boost.

Challenge

Oil and gas exploration has always been an expensive, high-risk operation and, as pressure grows on the world’s known fossil fuel resources, the stakes continue to rise. Organizations which undertake exploration use highly complex seismic data, not only to locate oil and gas reserves, but to understand how these reserves can be extracted in the most efficient way possible. Visualizing this seismic data for analysis is extremely computationally demanding.

Scalable Graphics was launched in early 2007 by a group of researchers from INRIA, France’s computer science research institute. Recognizing the potential of their research into distributed visualization on PC clusters to meet the visualization demands of vertical sectors like oil and gas, manufacturing, and life sciences, they took the step of spinning their project off into a business. Scalable Graphics was able to call on the relationship it had developed with NVIDIA at INRIA to provide hardware support and contacts through NVIDIA’s extensive customer network.

Solution

Scalable Graphics’ offering gives 3-D applications such as GOCAD from Paradigm the ability to scale across multiple GPUs, harnessing their extremely efficient parallel processing power. It distributes and renders data across multiple nodes of a graphics cluster, multiple GPUs of a single server or workstation, or any combination of the two. The technology plugs directly into existing applications that visualize large, complex datasets, or it can act as transparent middleware with no application intervention.

The company’s relationship with NVIDIA has been founded on a common interest in expanding the boundaries of GPU performance and scalability. Scalable Graphics Chief Executive Officer Xavier Cavin said, “Even before our company was founded, we recognized NVIDIA as a leading innovator in GPU technology and began talking with them about how our solutions could unlock the power of multiple GPUs to scale within a single application.

“NVIDIA were extremely supportive during Scalable Graphics’ start-up and continue to provide us with the latest hardware and technical assistance to ensure that our solutions are highly adaptable. It’s very important that we remain at the cutting edge of visualization technology, and NVIDIA helps us to do this. In return we are able to provide them with a very compelling illustration of the scalable processing power of multiple GPUs.”

Working with the likes of Sun, HP and Paradigm, Scalable Graphics is continuing to develop solutions which will bring the power of scaling across multiple GPUs to more applications and sectors.

For more information, visit www.scalablegraphics.com or www.nvidia.com/quadro.