SGI is best recognised as a hardware company, with a long and glorious history of technological innovation, crazy products, and powerful graphics. Less well known is the vast amount of software produced by SGI. Along with normal fare such as compilers and graphics programs, SGI also contribute a lot to Open Source projects.

The companies’ latest software offering, however, represents a major departure for Silicon Graphics. The VUE suite is a collection of software that, put simply, allows remote visualisation. Using VUE users are able to manipulate detailed graphics on devices as simple as PDAs and laptops.

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

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 expensive workstations on users’ desktops, relying instead on the power 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.