It's an ambitious goal, however, and roadblocks loom at every turn. Advanced graphics present some of the greatest challenges to today's computer computation and memory capacity, for example. To attain even a moderate level of realism and detail, each frame of an animation sequence must typically be drawn at a resolution of 1024 by 1024 "pixels," or dots on the screen. In full color, each pixel may consume between three and eight bytes of memory. Multiply it out, and you've got over eight megabytes of memory for a frame that may only be displayed for 1/30th of a second as part of a three-minute animation. Storing, transfering, and displaying such massive amounts of data push even modern supercomputers to the limit.
So how will advanced graphics become a standard tool for a scientist who only owns a PC? One potential solution is for researchers to run the computationally intensive aspects ...
