NVIDIA Quadro?4 Solutions Power Ohio Supercomputer Center Graphics Cluster

Jul 23, 2002

SIGGRAPH, San Antonio, CA - NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions announced that OSC (Ohio Supercomputer Center) has purchased and deployed more than 50 NVIDIA Quadro4 900 XGL workstation graphics boards to power a new cluster for volume rendering of graphics applications. Installed earlier this month in OSC's BALE (Blueprint for an Advanced Learning Environment) theater, the NVIDIA Quadro injected graphics cluster has already been put to work, servicing the projects of Ohio's students, researchers, government and commercial businesses.

The NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL-based graphics cluster will serve a dual role at OSC. Accessed by students and researchers from individual sets of flat panels, keyboards and mice, the cluster provides graphics computing and rendering support to the 50 individual workstations in the BALE theater. The cluster also combines the power of all NVIDIA Quadro4 900 XGL graphics boards into one stream entity to solve problems too big for any one system and traditionally reserved for specialized, high-end visualization supercomputers.

"OSC looks forward to using the latest technology from Nvidia to provide large-scale, real-time volume rendering results," said OSC Chief Operating Officer Al Stutz. "To be able to decompose the computation and graphics within the same node will provide real time results for massive computations that have long been needed by researchers across the state of Ohio. "

OSC's 50 Quadro4-based graphics cluster divides one huge problem into 50 segments. The results are then transferred over a high-speed MyrinetTM interconnect and displayed on one of four additional NVIDIA Quadro4 solutions OSC purchased for the cluster's "front end." This front-end display is able to compose the results from the graphics cluster nodes as well as provide additional rendering that is then output to a wide range of display options at very high resolutions and color depths.

"We are proud to be providing visual processing technology to a national resource and widely-acknowledged leader in supercomputing," said Jeff Fisher, executive vice president of sales at NVIDIA. "True to its mission statement, OSC is providing a blueprint for others on how to solve large computational problems in new and highly effective ways. We expect many others to follow OSC's lead by ganging together our powerful Quadro4 900 XGL graphics solutions to tackle some of the world's biggest graphics challenges with more performance and less expense."

For more information on BALE, see http://www.osc.edu/supercomputing/bale/index.shtml.

About OSC
OSC is Ohio's high performance computing and networking center. The Center provides scientific computing, networking, educational outreach, and information technology resources to state and national high performance computing and networking groups. OSC empowers its academic, industrial, and government partners to make Ohio the education and technology state of the future.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq - NVDA), located in Santa Clara, CA, is the global leader in advanced graphics and multimedia processing technology for the consumer and professional computing markets. Its 2D, 3D, video and multimedia capabilities make NVIDIA one of the premier semiconductor companies in the world. NVIDIA offers a wide range of products and services, delivering superior performance and crisp visual quality for PC-based applications such as manufacturing, science, e-business, entertainment and education.
For more information:

Susan Austin
NVIDIA Corporation
(408) 486-7336
saustin@nvidia.com

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