Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!bear From: bear@bu-pub.bu.edu (Blair M. Burtan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Digital Animation Production Message-ID: <42803@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 17 Nov 89 00:21:22 GMT Sender: daemon@bu-cs.BU.EDU Distribution: comp Organization: Boston Univ. Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering Lines: 98 Hang on to your hats... I saw some amazing things today. Today, I met with the owner and designer of Digital Animation Productions. The future of graphics workstations is here. And it works. A few days ago, I posted a paraphrased version of the full-page AmigaWorld ad. One response complained of a lack of pictures. No picture can do justice. The 19 year-old inventor has built and has in production an Inmos T800 transputer based graphics workstation. The system consists of several parts. First is the transputer graphics board. This board contains a T800, 2 Meg of video ram, and 2 Meg of system ram. The board connects to an external multisync monitor. The board renders in 800x600 in an incredible 16 million colors (24 bit planes). The board also renders in 1280x1024 in 16 million colors. But that's not the limit. The system can also be configured to MUCH higher resolutions on the order of 8000x8000 pixels. How? The monitor acts as a window much like a super bitmap. The second part (or parts) is a T800 processor board with 1 Meg ram. This is actually a module which can be added on. In other words, you can plug multiple processor boards to increase processing capability. The third module is an interface card that links all processor boards and the graphics board. The interface card plugs into an Zorro II slot of a 2000. The other cards all plug into the PC slots. The cards do not communicate via the PC slots. They just use them for power. The cards all connect to the interface card. A standard 2000 can hold 17 Transputers and the graphics card. More can be added to an external PC backplane chassis. The boards are built individually because at this stage the cost to keep stock is to great. Now for the good part. The first demo was a ray-traced picture of a Roman column structure. The program is called QRT and is in the public domain. The columns were rendered in marble. The marbling is a fractal. The sand-dunes are a wave construct. The clouds are fractals. When rendered on a 68030 with an '882 math chip, the image took 46 hours and 23 minutes. Using a five transputer system, the image was rendered in 2 minutes and 13 seconds. Yes, you read that right. 2 minutes 13 seconds. In 16 million colors. Yes, ALL 16 million colors. This brings up an interesting and useful feature of the system. The system can be used in two ways. One is to combine all transputers in the system into one big and powerful transputer. This is how the Connection Machine works. The other way is to assign each transputer in the system to a specific task. One could be assigned to computing the marble fractal. Another can be assigned to computing the sand waves. Another can be assigned to computing the cloud fractal, while another can be assigned to performing the ray-tracing. In this configuration, one processor is used as a master. This one dictates what tasks the slaves will perform. The second demo was actually rendered before my very eyes. The scene contained 200 glass spheres with 60 light sources each being gel-ed. The rendering took 1 minute and 10 seconds. Now, if this had been attempted with the '030 configuration, I could have come back in two days and it still wouldn't be finished. The throughput of the 5 transputer system is around 140 MIPS. Yeah, 140. But the beauty of the system is that you can keep adding processors to increase throughput. The third demo was some Mandelbrot sets. This stuff was being rendered in a matter of minutes. This system is making the computer world sit up and take notice. The boards will run on PC and Amigas as well as some high-end workstations. But the designer has no intention to build one for the Mac. Apple has offered to buy him out/in to develop the system for the Mac only. They offered a cool million plus. He said no. Yippee! Yes the system works on other buses, but he prefers the Amiga because of the multitasking. The trnasputer system is totally separate to the Amiga. The means that you can be rendering a complex image while doing some word processing or desktop publishing and there's no worry of the system crashing. If the Ami crashes, the transputer keeps crunching away. This won't work on a PC. First of all, the PC can't multitask and second, if the PC crashes, you have to start over again. Impulse is working on a port of Turbo Silver and Microillusions is porting Photon Paint. And, get a load of this one, the guy who wrote Jet for Sublogic is developing something on the system. Unfortunately, this demo is being held up by a bad modem link. So, now that I've got you drooling on your terminal, you'll probably want to know what this feat of engineering costs. Well, it ain't cheap. The Graphics board is $6000. Individual processor boards are $2000. Buy four of them and the cost is $7000. There have been about 500 sold already. Yes this is a real system. No jumpers or other nasty things. This is not for the average home user unless you intend to put off buying that new car. SLAC is buying one to render their experiments. Production houses can use them with a SCSI film recorder to make commercials in much less time and much less cost than buying time on a Cray or other system. So, what about the future? As if the system as it is wasn't enough, the designer will release next year processor boards each capable of sustained performance of 100 MIPS and a burst performance of 200 MIPS. And, the company plans to develop a DSP system with phenomenal capabilities like being able to copy, yes copy, a CD onto a writeable CD. Record companies will pay hefty sums to keep this product off the market. But the designer intends it for use in the music industry to enable more musicians to produce their own CDs. The demo tape will be replaced by the demo CD. And that's all, folks. He's 19. He's a politcal science major at Boston University. And he runs this company. The address given in AmigaWorld is incorrect. The real address is 10 Thacher St. Suite 16 Boston, MA 02113 (617)-720-2355 I'm working on getting him access to the Usenet so he can personally answer your questions.