GTC was for us the occasion to meet, among other innovators in supercomputing, Xavier Cavin, CEO of the French start-up Scalable Graphics, who presented 3D Cloud, a solution for viewing 3D applications running in the cloud. Worth noting: 3D cloud adds interactivity to visualization, allowing industrial simulation applications to be remotely controlled. In other words, the solution is used exactly as if the application and data would reside on your console or workstation, which consolidates benefits in terms of cost, performance and agility.

For the occasion, Scalable Graphics, global automaker Peugeot and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne achieved a world first during a workshop by interactively simulating, in real time, the global illumination of a PSA Peugeot Citroën prototype car running from more than 8,000 miles away on URCA’s supercomputer ROMEO. 3D Cloud uses the power of the GPUs on the host server to encode images of the application, which are then sent through the network on the local system. 3D Cloud adapts to the network bandwidth to provide a remarkably smooth combination of rendering and application control. Quite frankly, we were impressed by what we saw. Check it out in the video below and see for yourself…