Breathing life into human animation

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland University has bought a $2 million SGI Onyx 3400 supercomputer to support its world-leading research into computer-generated modelling of the human body.

Engineering science Professor Peter Hunter said the computer was needed to handle the huge volume of data to render models of body parts.

"You can animate a large and extremely high resolution model of, say, a beating heart or a breathing lung. You can spin it around [on screen], make changes to it and see the results of those changes," Professor Hunter said.

"We now have the ability to take complex medical images and interpret them with a 3-D model of the body, which has important implications for the diagnostics and treatment of many diseases."

The university has a contract with United States company Physiome Science which is using its heart models for drug discovery.

It also has a stake in US company LifeFX which is using part of the university's data to develop Facemail - an animated head that reads aloud email messages.

An Auckland University team is also building software for Kodak that will allow the company to produce animated faces from photographs at its retail outlets. The "face" can then be used as a Facemail reader.

The SGI Onyx 3400 will also allow researchers to link the work they are doing, which reaches below the cellular level, with the Human Genome project.

"A common problem is that you may have great data from an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and CT scans and so forth, and you may have data from DNA, but how do you match those?"

The Onyx 3400 has 16, 64-bit Mips processors, rated at 500 MHz, and 16 gigabytes of Ram (random access memory) in a shared memory architecture.

Each processor has 8Mb of level two cache, compared with the 256Kb of cache on Pentium chips.

"For fast floating point calculations, which are the key to graphics, you need a lot of cache close to the chip," said Professor Hunter.

Although the machine is still undergoing installation tests, indications are that it will perform almost three times faster than the 32-processor SGI Origin 2000 bought by the university three years ago.

The new machine is the first in New Zealand with an Infinite Reality III graphics engine or G-brick.

An SGI VizServer means any users on the campus network can access the power of the G-brick through Linux or NT workstations.

The university is also buying an IBM Regatta H server to handle the straight number crunching required in the research.

The server goes into production later this year and will have multiple Power 4 chips running at 1.3 GHz.

Professor Hunter said the cost of the machine has been shared between the University and Physiome Science.

The university also got money from the New Economy Research Fund to develop a model of the human knee, which it used to buy an MRI scanner.

Researchers are measuring muscle activation and bone properties to calculate the forces at work inside the knee.

"We have completed modelling of the bones and muscles," Professor Hunter said. "We are modelling ligaments, tendons and cartilage, and are working with orthopaedic groups to explore applications."

Links


Bioengineering Research Group

LifeFX