Impact of gigabit network research on scientific visualization

Networks based on the High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) will become the norm at LANL. The rami cations of such a high speed networking paradigm on scienti c visualization are enormous. Not only will scientist have the capability ofnetworked framebu er animation loops in their o ces, but the partitioning of graphics tasks between MIMD, SIMD and specialized hardware will also be feasible. Of course, as bandwidth increases, the problem size quickly grows to exceed whatever the limits. For this reason, the investigation of gigabyte networks currently underway at Los Alamos National Laboratory