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February 27, 12:10 EST
QUEENSLAND, Australia -- Officials at Thales Training & Simulation (TT&S) Pty Limited's Australia business recently selected an SGI Onyx 3000 series high-performance graphics system with three Infinite Reality3 graphics pipes from Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in Mountain View, Calif., to serve as the image generator for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) F-111 mission simulator at RAAF Base Amberley in Queensland, Australia.
This system will help train aircrews from the RAAF's Strike Reconnaissance Group. The three SGI graphics subsystems are dedicated to providing an out-the-window scene for the pilot and navigator, SGI officials say. InfiniteReality3 is the latest version of the SGI graphics subsystem from and is the engine for the SGI Onyx 3000 series, company officials say.
"SGI technology has proven to be highly reliable and supportable over the past seven years of the project," says Mike Renie, F-111 simulator project manager at TT&S. "The F-111 simulator has achieved a 99.8% availability rate with a Silicon Graphics Onyx system contributing considerably to the success of the program, and we are expecting even better performance from the SGI Onyx 3800 system. The use of a common vendor (SGI) on the F-111 simulator was invaluable during the development phase of the project and is even more significant in the maintenance phase."
The simulator, powered by SGI technology, not only provides training for the RAAF's F-111 aircrews in such essentials as takeoff and landing, but, more important, it also enables aircrews to simulate the mission profiles they will fly, exposing them to all the contingencies of flying a tactical mission, SGI officials say. Flying missions that are difficult to practice in reality can be taught without restriction in this virtual environment. Dangerous low-altitude missions involving the delivery of missiles and bombs can be practiced in the F-111 mission simulator without disturbing civilian populations and communities in Australia, company officials say.
The SGI Onyx 3000 series, designed to simultaneously process 3D graphics, 2D imagery, and video data, also scales from single-user systems to those that combine the ultimate in supercomputing and visualization technologies, SGI officials say. The series of graphics systems also has the power and real-time visualization capability to concurrently process imagery, video, 3D terrain, and geospatial data, company officials claim.
The SGI Onyx 3000 series is the third-generation implementation of the SGI NUMA architecture. The tightly coupled architecture, which has inherent scaling of system and graphics bandwidth, is central to the series' visual performance, SGI officials say. The SGI NUMA architecture also increases memory bandwidth and reduces memory latency, company officials claim.
For more information on the SGI visualization systems and SGI contact the company on the World Wide Web at http://www.sgi.com.
Military & Aerospace Electronics
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