Press Room - 2001 Archive

PANORAM CHIEF THEO MAYER ADDRESSES THE FUTURE
OF LARGE SCALE VISUALIZATION COMPUTERS WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF HEWLETT-PACKARD'S SV6 SYSTEM

SUN VALLEY (CA) - As Panoram Technologies participates in Hewlett-Packard's product launch of the next generation of visualization computer-HP's "sv6" -Panoram President and CEO Theo Mayer is poised to comment on the impact of this important new technology to the future of large scale visualization.

Mayer is the founder of the 9-year-old Panoram- a company that has been instrumental in defining and developing this rapidly expanding commercial niche of advanced computing. Panoram has grown into the world's premier supplier of advanced high-resolution collaborative visualization facilities with a deployed base of over 80 large scale venues. Panoram not only builds but also maintains these facilities in challenging environments from Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and Korea in Asia, to Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt in the Middle East, to Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Trinidad in South America, to more conventional locations through North America and Europe.

Panoram is now moving this technology from the early adopter stage to standardized and deployable solutions, prompting Mayer to proclaim that the new Hewlett Packard scalable visualization system represented by the sv6 is "more than a powerful graphics computer; it represents the architecture for the next generation of real-time 3D visualization.
"The sv6 architecture embodies the direction for large scale visualization for the next 10 years," he says, "and thankfully comes to market just as older monolithic systems are becoming obsolete."

Mayer reports that Panoram is very proud to have been working with the HP visualization development team from the very beginning, explaining that the teaming efforts began "for us" when Panoram agreed in December, 1998 to support a visualization demo by HP's engineering team to their management using a Panoram GVR120 display and a crude prototype computer system.

"This demo was cobbled together on a racquetball court - during a blizzard just before Christmas in Denver, Colorado. "The acrid smell of sweat in the racquetball court underscored the combined teams' efforts to get through the demo successfully!" And, early in 1999, the HP development team was given the green light to proceed with the project. By September, they had the first components of their Visualize Center system operating and to market.

"Now the payoff begins," Mayer says, "with the fully scalable sv6 system made up of rack mounted off-the-shelf HP computer modules, combined with HP's integrating middle-ware that coordinates the computational requirements across each module without the software application knowing, and finally, with the powerful new HP sv6 compositor system that brings the graphic components back together and completes the exciting new architecture. The result is a fully scalable system that behaves like a powerful monolithic graphics computer, but it is made of components that can be expanded and upgraded as the user's needs or the project evolve.

"The new architecture can be configured into high-performance budget systems that are significantly less expensive than the previous SGI based entry levels for large scale visualization, or the architecture can be expanded into leviathan systems that break all previous real-time 3D visualization performance and quality standards.

"Finally," Mayer points out, "it is important to mention how refreshing it has been to work with an advanced computer hardware group that has the foresight and humility to listen and respond both to their customers and to visualization veterans like Panoram.

"With that attitude and the new architecture, real-time 3D visualization's immediate and long range future is bright indeed!"