VOXAR-all ATM distributed biomedical visualization: 1) local OC-3 linked workstation cluster, 2) remote OC-3 linked 40 GFLOPS Cray T3D MPP

Northrop Grumman Corp. (NGC), in collaboration with Cray Research and the University of Southern California (USC), has developed a distributed biomedical 3D visualization system. Currently, this system provides an extended AVS visualization capability to a cluster of SUN SPARC-20 workstations located at three locations across the USC Health Sciences Campus. A supercomputer complex of a HiPPI-connected Cray YMP vector architecture and a Cray T3D massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture provides a 40 GFLOPS processing capability to a remote cluster of three workstations via an ATM-switched SONET STS-3 link. The workstations run the AVS kernel locally while using remote procedure calls to run AVS modules on the Cray YMP. NGC modifies AVS modules, then spawns processes distributively across entire partitions of the Cray T3D using an NGC-Cray virtual shared memory protocol and underlying Cray T3D memory management hardware. Communication between the workstation cluster and the supercomputers is then provided with TCP/IP sockets over the SONET STS-3 link. This configuration provides an interactive real-time visualization capability to a remote AVS workstation environment operating on a physician's desktop. To provide a cohesive integration of this system, an object-relational database management system (O-RDBMS) is applied to provide representation of 3D spatial objects and relations of these objects to other applications. Management of network and mosaic resources, enabling access to the medical community, is under development with new extensions of the existing O-RDBMS.<
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