Researchers have welcomed a new high-spec Intel Itanium-based Linux workstation, unveiled by Silicon Graphics and aimed at the visual computing market.

Priced from $30,000, the Prism workstation has been built to more efficiently process the high volumes of data created by applications such as cancer research, oil exploration and car safety analysis.

It is designed to address terabyte-sized, highly complex data as a single data-set in memory instead of breaking it into chunks to process.

"The pace of scientific discovery and engineering innovation has never been more aggressive," said Paul McNamara, senior vice president and general manager at Visual Systems Group, in a statement.

"Silicon Graphics Prism gives a broader range of users the most advanced visualisation capability available.

"By providing this capability on a Linux-based open platform, more researchers and innovators will be able to leverage this leading-edge level of visual computing."

Larry Smarr, of the University of California, and director of the California Institute for Telecoms and IT, added: "Accelerating the pace of scientific discovery requires detailed insight into tera-scale data-sets that is greatly enabled through the scalability, power and bandwidth of Prism.

"The system has the ability to deliver insight to disparate groups using visual area networking which enables the kind of inter-disciplinary collaboration that will result in unique breakthroughs."

Scaling up to 16 graphics pipelines and 512 processors, each of the graphics cards handles resolutions up to 3,820 by 2,480 pixels.