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SCALABLE 3D DATA VISUALIZATION

The ANARI (Analytic Rendering Interface) API enables users to build the description of a scene to generate imagery, rather than specifying the details of the rendering process, providing simplified visualization application development and cross-vendor portability to diverse rendering engines, including those using state-of-the-art ray tracing.

“A win-win for the industry, ANARI is designed to enable scalable, portable rendering that makes state-of-the-art rendering techniques and hardware-optimized renderers widely accessible, while still enabling the interactivity necessary for exploratory visualization. Khronos anticipated this industry need and has been working on the ANARI specification for over two years to bring the 3D visualization community a well-designed, cross-platform API. Looking beyond our initial focus on scientific visualization, we believe ANARI will provide value to many developers across diverse domains that need a simpler, high-level API to render sophisticated imagery.”

Publicly Available Implementations

NVIDIA VisRTX rendering using ANARI
San Miguel scene © Guillermo M. Leal Llaguno

The following ANARI implementations have been released that are compatible with the ANARI SDK:

 

Strong ANARI Industry Support

All layers in the scientific visualization stack are represented; GPU Vendors, Rendering Engines, Visualization Libraries and Tools, Applications

Industry Support for ANARI

“The ANARI rendering API is a big step in standardizing the pipeline of scientific rendering, allowing developers and scientists to write code once and render many places without needing to know the specifics of the device. We look forward to supporting multiple platforms for GPU and CPU rendering via our Radeon ProRender backend for ANARI, which is expected to be available soon at GPUOpen.com.”

“As an advocate for open, industry-wide standards, Intel embraces the high-level rendering API specification ANARI led by the Khronos Group. The ANARI working group found the fine balance between providing ease-of-use for applications development and delivering capabilities for high-performance implementations by vendors. Intel supports the ANARI API with an open-source implementation based on Intel® OSPRay (part of the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit), contributing expertise and technologies to advance scientific visualization, high-fidelity rendering, and MPI scalability to ANARI users.”

“At Kitware, providing access to the latest large scale scientific and medical visualization techniques is critical to our business. With ANARI we can leverage its API to easily support multiple backends ranging from ray tracing to traditional polygonal engines across deployments ranging from individual clients to distributed rendering on the largest supercomputers. For applications like ParaView ANARI is a huge win, giving us access to many rendering engines without the prohibitive per-engine development costs.”

“ANARI not only will contribute to application portability of visual analytics tools, but also will reduce the burden of developing and maintaining visualization services across pre-exascale and exascale systems at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OCLF).”

“The ANARI open rendering interface standard will help address the unique needs of technical and scientific visualization tools, enabling them to leverage state-of-the-art renderers using powerful ray tracing methods for interactive, in-situ, and post-hoc visualization on hardware platforms ranging from PCs to the largest parallel computers in the world. ANARI’s high-level interface will enable visualization software developers to rapidly deploy cutting-edge hardware-optimized renderers and rendering technologies in their tools, relying on an ecosystem of robust standard-conforming implementations. Users of leading visualization tools such as VMD will be able to make routine use of state-of-the-art visualization performance and cinematic quality rendering within their preferred software.”

 

ANARI Webinar

Join us for this on-demand webinar where our ANARI experts provided a detailed overview of the API, its accompanying SDK, as well as updates from developers already using and implementing the API. Presentations included:

  • A Tour of the ANARI API
  • Experiences with Adopting ANARI in Existing Visualization Applications
  • How to Create an ANARI Implementation
  • An Ask the Experts Q&A Session

Visit the ANARI Webinar page to download the presentation slides.

ANARI Portable Access to Rendering Engines


Comparing ANARI and Vulkan


Before and After ANARI


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Join the ANARI Community

There are several ways to follow the latest ANARI developments, provide feedback on the specification, and get your questions answered. It's a great way to get involved and will help forge the ANARI community and ecosystem.

Join Khronos. If you would like to participate directly in the ongoing development of the ANARI standard please join Khronos and become a member of the ANARI Working Group.

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