BEAVORTON, OR – The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, has announced that its Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group has received strong industry support and is transitioning to a full Working Group to create an analytic rendering interface API for data visualization.
This new API will be called ANARI. Any interested company is invited to join Khronos and participate in the ANARI Working Group under the consortium’s multi-company governance process to have a voice and a vote in the creation of this open, royalty-free standard. This initiative is expected to be of particular interest to any company creating scientific visualization rendering engines, libraries and applications.
“We are excited to launch the ANARI Working Group and begin creating a standard to foster significant data visualization innovation while streamlining development efforts for the industry,” said Peter Messmer, ANARI working group chair and senior manager of HPC Visualization at NVIDIA. “ANARI will free visualization software developers from non-trivial rendering details while enabling graphics experts and hardware vendors to avoid domain-specific functionality and optimizations in their rendering backends.”
Recent advances in rendering technology for image generation – especially the introduction of real-time raytracing – significantly advance data visualization and aid in interpretation of complex data. However, analytic rendering can lead to increased development costs and complexity that drives project time. Graphics standards such as The Khronos Group’s Vulkan, a graphics and compute API and its much-anticipated upcoming ray tracing extension, could provide powerful rendering hardware abstractions, but they are still too time-consuming for many visualization applications to utilize.
To remedy this, Khronos announced in November 2019 the creation of the Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group, with the intent to investigate industry interest in creating an open API for data visualization. Now, driven by intense industry support, Khronos has created the ANARI Working Group to begin work on creating an open, higher-level analytics rendering interface API that will simplify the development of visualization applications while leveraging the full potential of modern rendering capabilities. Such a standard will make advanced rendering techniques more accessible and widely used, while also reducing software development costs.
The following companies have participated in and supported the Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group resulting in the launch of the ANARI initiative: AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Autodesk, The Boeing Company, delta-h, D/VisionLab, Intel, Kitware, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, SURVICE Engineering, Tecplot, Inc., Texas Advanced Computing Center.