Silicon Graphics (www.sgi.com) and PipelineFX have teamed to bring its Qube! render farm management system benefits to a complete SGI server and Network Attached Storage (NAS) workflow solution.

Built around the new SGI Altix XE servers based on the new Intel Xeon dual-core processors and SGI Infinite Storage NAS technology, the new Render Management Solution is relevant to a range of market segments including animation, special effects, game development, bioinformatics, engineering and government efforts. Ideal for rendering and build processing alike, Qube! integrates directly with most leading 3D modeling and rendering applications, and has demonstrated many times that it can improve productivity and increase content quality while optimizing hardware resources.

PipelineFX's Qube! combines state-of-the-art techniques for batch queuing, distributed processing and render farm management. The software maximizes job throughput by distributing the millions of computational tasks that occur during the graphics rendering and software build processes. SGI is renowned for its years of experience in content management for editing, effects, and digital intermediates. The company's open heterogeneous operating system approach to data management makes it the ideal partner for PipelineFX.

Designed for multiple operating environments, Qube! interfaces directly to all the leading modeling and rendering applications including Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Studio, Avid XSI (Softimage), Mental Images mental ray and Pixar Renderman. PipelineFX will debut the new solution at SIGGRAPH 2006.

Qube! is currently used for a variety of rendering applications, including data-intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and engineering analysis. The University of Hawaii Center for Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics is using Qube! to manage high-performance computation on an SGI Altix server as they sequence the papaya genome. Qube!'s first incarnation, written for the SGI IRIX OS, was used on the 1999 movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and is currently being used on major summer motion picture releases. Qube! is also a very important component of game development at the world's largest game studios worldwide and has been used on a number of their games.

The new SGI Render Management Solution with Qube! will create that same level of performance enhancement based on managing the render farm environment as part of the complete workflow that has afforded SGI its reputation as the top-of-the-line data management and storage provider - in multiple configurations. SGI NAS solutions easily connect to existing network infrastructure to serve UNIX, Windows, Linux and Apple clients. For customers with larger/faster data rendering and storage needs, SGI and PipelineFX offer the Render Management Solution running on an SGI Altix 4700 server, which is best suited for the big data set class of problems/applications.

SGI unveiled SGI Altix XE, a new family of Linux OS-based servers and factory-integrated clusters powered by new Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors introduced today by Intel. Unlike competing systems, SGI Altix XE clusters are custom-configured to optimize leading applications, and are backed by SGI and its decades-long track record of successful customer deployments. SGI Altix XE cluster solutions can be ordered today. Base configuration pricing starts at less than $3,100.