The packages were chosen against competitive products, amongst other factors, for their compliance to the Open Inventor standards to which all major hardware vendors have subscribed, for their simplification of the overall architecture of the software systems, and for accuracy and reliability of the graphical results they produce from scientific calculations. CERN will standardise on these products, and other research bodies involved in the experiments will be encouraged to do likewise.
"The IRIS Explorer software is exactly suited for visualisation of large and complex datasets, such as those likely to characterise the research at CERN. The use of standards-based software like OpenGL and Open Inventor for 2D and 3D graphics provides the reassurance of hardware and software interoperability, which is essential for any long term project," said Dr Brian Ford, Director of NAG Ltd. "The NAG numerical library routines have been used by CERN and the high energy Physics community for several years and we are delighted that the new high quality graphics software will be backed up by solid and reliable numerical routines."
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the USA counterpart of CERN, have already standardised on IRIS Explorer in an agreement signed earlier this year.
The agreement with CERN marks a significant development in the use of NAG's software products. CERN has been using the NAG numerical library software for several years. The latest generation graphics and data visualisation software allow for direct interfacing of numerical library routines into the components of the visualisation pipeline.