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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.

ANARI 1.0 Provisional is Here!

Launched November 2nd, 2021

“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.”

Jefferson Amstutz
ANARI working group chair and senior software engineer at NVIDIA

ANARI Portable Access to Rendering Engines


Comparing ANARI and Vulkan


Before and After ANARI


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.”

Brian Savery
Radeon™ ProRender software lead, AMD

“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.”

Jim Jeffers
Senior principal engineer and senior director of Intel Advanced Rendering and Visualization

“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.”

Ken Martin
Co-founder and distinguished engineer at Kitware

“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).”

Benjamín Hernández
Computer Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

“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.”

John Stone
Senior research programmer at University of Illinois

 

Get Involved!

Data visualization community: Share your feedback via GitHub and Twitter, including input on how the ANARI Working Group can continue to address the needs of the data visualization community.

If you’d like to get involved, visit the "Khronos Group Members" page.