Quick off the mark, Ardent Computer Corp, Sunnyvale, California developer of the Titan Graphics Supercomputer, has done and implementation of its Dore three-dimensional visualisation software to Intel Corp’s hot new i860 microprocessor – also known as the 80860. Intel is using Dore – it stands for Dynamic Object-Rendering Environment, on its i860 CPU development system to illustrate the new level of computational power provided by the processor for compute-intensive tasks such as interactive graphics and simultaneous graphics and data processing computing. Ardent reckons that Dore is easy enough to use that i860 CPU programmers will be able to take full advantage of the new processor’s power with minimal effort, and Intel has been able to merge real-time visualisation with computationally intensive codes in a suite of interactive demonstrations. The object oriented Dore toolkit enables interactive users to get a graphics picture of the results of compute-intensive applications such as molecular modeling, computational fluid dynamics and animation, and then manipulate the results on the screen. It supplies a single interface for both interactive dynamic imagery for modelling and for high-quality static images for presentation and animation sequences, and is extensible so that developers and users can contribute their own attributes, primitives, textures, shading, and rendering functions with C or Fortran code. And these extensions will be portable across all implementations of Dore. Dore also interfaces flexibly with different types of applications databases so that users can run a calculation and simultaneously look at results as the computation proceeds. The Intel effort is part of Ardent’s effort to establish Dore as a widely available standard for advanced visualisation, and the source code can be licensed from Ardent by developers of i860 and other products. The licence fee is $250 for universities and research establishments, and $15,000 plus support fee for commercial organisations. It is available for graphics and other supercomputers, and workstations.
