Discreet, SGI power NBC election night graphics

NBC and its cable networks MSNBC and CNBC used broadcast graphics systems supplied by SGI (Mountain View, CA) and Discreet (Montreal) for last night's US election night coverage.

The three networks used a total of nine SGI Onyx2 visualization systems running Discreet frost, a real-time graphics software application giving the NBC network the ability to render fully anti-aliased 3D imagery and text in real-time as well as update graphics templates.

Data for rendering these graphics originated from SGI 1400M servers running a database connected to the Voter News Service (VNS). To provide its audience with the latest election numbers, NBC also dedicated an entire studio to real-time poll results. More than 40 SGI 230 Windows NT OS-based visual workstations and SGI 1600SW flat panel displays collected poll data and sent it to the servers.

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Edited by Tom Butts