Sun Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

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

Solaris Solaris 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 ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

Sun Ray The Sun Ray was a stateless thin client computer (and associated software) aimed at corporate environments, originally introduced by Sun Microsystems in September 1999 and discontinued by Oracle Corporation in 2014. It featured a smart card r ...

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-queui ...

. 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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

technologies:

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...

to perform distributed 3D rendering, VirtualGL to re-route 3D rendering jobs to arbitrary graphics devices, and TurboVNC 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 Fire is a series of server computers introduced in 2001 by Sun Microsystems (since 2010, part of Oracle Corporation). The Sun Fire branding coincided with the introduction of the UltraSPARC III processor, superseding the UltraSPARC II-ba ...

servers *

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

workstations * Graphics Accelerators: Sun XVR-2500, Nvidia Quadro FX, or

Nvidia Quadro Plex The Nvidia Quadro Plex is an external graphics processing unit ''(Visual Computing System)'' designed for large-scale 3D visualizations. The system consists of a box containing a pair of high-end Nvidia Quadro graphics cards featuring a variety ...

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, and

MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...

. 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