IBM Corp yesterday said it boosted the versatility of its Power Visualization System, a parallel server for generating and manipulated complex images at high speed in applications such as medicine and geophysics, and cut prices on the thing by 25% to 40%, lowering the entry point to $320,000 from $528,000. The Power Visualisation System server is an eight- to 32-way parallel processor using Intel Corp 80860 RISCs, available with 256Mb to 1.5Gb and an estimated peak rate of 2.5 GFLOPS. It also said it will market versions of Visualization Data Explorer software for Hewlett-Packard Co, Sun Microsystems Inc and Silicon Graphics Inc workstations as well as for the RS/6000, and will run stand-alone on the alien workstations as well as over a network accessing the server. IBM also introduced a software development kit, including C and Fortran compilers and associated development tools. The software development toolkit is available from The Portland Group Inc at a site licence price of $37,000. Visualization Data Explorer for the RS/6000 is $5,900; IBM also offers a 60-day free evaluation copy. Pricing and availability for the Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics workstations will be set later on this year, the company said.
