SGI is best recognised as a hardware outfit, with a long and glorious history of technological innovation, fantastic designs, and powerful graphics. Less well known is the vast amount of software produced by SGI. Along with standard fare such as compilers and graphics products, SGI also contribute heavily to Open Source projects.

The companies’ latest software product, on the other hand, represents a major departure for Silicon Graphics. The VUE suite is a collection of tools that, at it’s core, allows remote visualisation. Using VUE users are able to manipulate complex graphics on devices as simple as PDAs and laptops.

VUE stands for Visual User Experience, and is made up of five separate software components.

FusionVUE combines multiple sources of information, producing an easy to use graphical display. SoftVUE converts any standard platform into part of a visualisation and computing platform. PowerVUE provides powerful realtime visualisation. RemoteVUE allows the remote display of complex graphics. Finally, EventVUE provides a realtime graphical overview of complex situations or events.

It’s clear that the VUE suite has the power to replace many large workstations on users’ desktops, relying instead on the abilities of a large compute server in a data centre. Playing to many of SGI recent offerings, the VUE suite heralds a return to SGI groundbreaking lead in visualisation.