[hungryhobbit]

Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :(

Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections.

SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) had seen before. Nowadays, you can probably get something similar on WebMD, but at the time it was crazy impressive.

[jandrese]

Back around 1997 or so I saw the first Map Tile example hosted on an Origin 200. Basically just Google Earth minus the landmarks or directions, but at the time it was mind blowing to start way out in orbit and be able to zoom in on any spot on Earth. The machine was next to a 19" rack with multiple large RAID arrays feeding the machine, and when you panned around you could see all of the lights on the front of the rack blink in unison.

[saltcured]

I seem to recall the earliest "real-time" Visible Human volume rendering demo being run on either a Cray or IBM (?) supercomputer back in the late 1990s. But, I couldn't remember enough keywords to find a reference and confirm it.

What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.