FERGUSON@TMASL.EXXON.COM (04/24/89)
I've been shopping for a 3-D image processing machine, for $120,000 or less. I've looked at Ardent, Pixar, and Silicon Graphics. My Apollo salesman told me that I should look hard at the 10000 for just such an application. I've been skipping over it because our application deals with voxels, and not surface geometry. We deal with CT-scan type images, on the order of 512x512 images, 300-500 high in a stack, and 16 bits per pixel. Just to store these images in memory requires that we map them down to 8-bits per pixel, and have at least 64 Megs of RAM. So far, the only applications I've ever seen on Apollo systems are things like Intelligent Light, which do an astounding job of rendering shapes that were defined by someone's imagination. I've also seen some image processing, but in 2-D. Has anyone seen any 3-D volume rendering on the 10000? Since our data acquisition unit is attached to a 4000, and we do our volume reconstruction with an Apollo and a Mercury Array processor, I'd love to keep our data transfer off an Ethernet (the APollo Token Ring doesn't have collisions more than once every couple weeks when power goes out, or the node with the token crashes). Anyway, I don't think that GMR3D is capable of this magnitude of data, and don't know of any software available. Does anyone else have a similar applicatio n or does anyone have any insight as to why a DN10000 (with no vector processor) would lend itself to this type of work? Thanks in advance, Scott Ferguson Exxon Research & Engineering ferguson@erevax.bitnet