The Boeing 777 was the first airliner to be 100 percent digitally designed using 3D computer graphics. The resulting digital mockup is 23,000x more complex than today’s typical digital game assets and therefore requires some serious muscle to render at interactive frame rates. Every subsystem including wiring harnesses, hydraulics, air-conditioning, and fuel delivery are modeled in excruciating detail. Prior research has shown that this is truly a supercomputer class problem which is why we have unleashed a prototype piece of LANL’s Roadrunner system on it at this years SC07 conference.

In the IBM booth at SC07 the 350M triangle Boeing digital mockup will be rendered real-time at 1080p resolution using a hybrid cluster of Cell processor based QS21 blades and a Ridgeback (AMD Opteron) memory server. The Ridgeback holds the 25GB digital model in its memory and services blade data request via NFS RDMA over 2GB/sec InfiniBand.  Each blade is responsible for a dynamic region of the screen and therefore only requires a fraction of the digital model to be cached in its local 2GB memory. These regions are further subdivided among the local SPEs which DMA via software caches from the address space of the Opteron forming a memory hierarchy that's transparent to the programmer.

                          128GB                   2GB                      256KB

(x86 disk) –> (x86 memory) –> (Cell memory) –> (SPE local store) –> (SPE register file)

          120MB/sec            2GB/sec              25GB/sec                 50GB/sec

IBM’s software ray-traced solution (iRT) has several key advantages:

1) Completely scalable renderer (Frame rate scales linearly with number of blades)

2) Much higher image quality using ambient occlusion

3) Ability to scale to very larger scenes while maintaining interactive frame rates

4) High compute density (no power hungry GPUs in the server racks)

 Sample frames: 

Many thanks to The Boeing Company and David Kasik for providing us with the 777 digital model.