Sun Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

in January 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers,

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and

Sun Grid Engine Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director), was a grid computing computer cluster software system (otherwise known as a batch-queuing ...

. The Sun Visualization System software was based on several

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

technologies:

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in Group 6 element, group 6. It is a steely-grey, Luster (mineralogy), lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium ...

to perform distributed 3D rendering, VirtualGL to re-route 3D rendering jobs to arbitrary graphics devices, and

TurboVNC VirtualGL (VGL) is an open-source software, open-source software package that redirects the 3D rendering commands from Unix and Linux OpenGL applications to 3D accelerator hardware in a dedicated server and sends the rendered output to a (thin cl ...

to deliver the rendered 3D images to a client or clients. Sun sponsored and/or contributed changes back to these projects throughout the life of the Sun Visualization System. In January 2009, The VirtualGL project reported that it was no longer being sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and in April 2009, Sun announced that it was discontinuing the Sun Shared Visualization and Sun Scalable Visualization products. Customers were able to order the products through July 31, 2009, and service and support was provided until October 2014.

Main hardware components

* Sun Fire servers *

Sun Ultra The Sun Ultra is a discontinued line of workstation and Server (computing), server computers developed and sold by Sun Microsystems, comprising two distinct generations. The original line was introduced in 1995 and discontinued in 2001. This ...

workstations * Graphics Accelerators: Sun XVR-2500,

Nvidia Quadro Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine l ...

FX, or Nvidia Quadro Plex VCS

Software

* The Sun Shared Visualization software consisted of VirtualGL, TurboVNC, a proprietary plugin to allow VirtualGL to send images directly to Sun Ray clients, and glueware to allow remote 3D rendering jobs to be managed by Sun GridEngine. * The Sun Scalable Visualization software contained customized versions of Chromium, OpenSceneGraph,

ParaView ParaView is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain in ...

, and

MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, a tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a medical procedure that illustrates heart function * Mannose phosphate isomerase, an enzyme ...

. It also contained glueware to allow distributed 3D rendering jobs to be managed by Sun GridEngine.

External links

OpenSolaris Project: Visualization for HPC

VirtualGL: 3D Without Boundaries

User’s Guide for VirtualGL 2.1.1 and TurboVNC 0.5

VizWorld: Official Word from Sun on their Visualization Offerings
{{Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems software Sun Microsystems hardware Computer-related introductions in 2007