A Rising Sun at NPS: Visualization with RenderMan on the "Hamming" Supercomputer

Dr. Jeff Haferman, NPS and Jeffrey Weekley, NPS

Jeff Haferman and Jeff Weekley discuss rendering and visualization on the Hamming supercomputer at the 2010 CENIC conference.

In early 2009, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) brought the 1152 core "hamming" Sun Microsystems blade system online. Concurrently, NPS procured RenderMan™ software from Pixar Animation Studios. In this presentation, Dr. Heferman and Mr. Weekley describe the hamming supercomputer, the Maya 3D modeling package with Pixar's RenderMan software - used by film studios to develop popular animated feature films such as "Ratatouille" and "Up" and in visual effects for movies like "Where the Wild Things Are" - and how NPS used them together to create realistic visualizations in a format suitable for projection on the NPS Sony 4K display and for ultra-high resolution streaming media over CENIC networks. Dr. Heferman and Mr. Weekley demonstrate how advances in Hollywood-style animation and post-production tools have benefited researchers at NPS who are working on scientific visualization and streaming media in support of the School's academic and research missions.