Sun Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by Sun Microsystems in January 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers, Solaris, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and Sun Grid Engine. The Sun Visualization System software was based on several open source technologies: Chromium to perform distributed 3D rendering,

VirtualGL VirtualGL is an 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) client located elsewhere o ...

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

TurboVNC VirtualGL is an 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) client located elsewhere on ...

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 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. 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