Siggraph

Dinner Excelsior (great). Company: Graham and Karen Hawkes (Hawkes Ocean Technologies), Jim Zafarana (VP and worldwide marketing manager for HP’s workstation global business unit) and his colleague Tom Salomone, plus my colleagues from Videography, Post and CGW.

While CG has finally mastered simulating the oceans, the real thing remains a mystery waiting to be explored, says Graham Hawkes of Hawkes Ocean Technologies. He’s an engineer and describes his business as a “skunk works”. He’s pusuing “underwater flight” via swift, manueverable vehicles that can go to great depths and in the process placing himself in an odd sort of arms race against the scientific programs of whole countries–China, Japan, and the USA’s own Alvin program–all racing to get to the abyss of the ocean before James Cameron does.

HP was hosting the dinner to introduce Hawkes to film and TV industy journalists. Why? Because Hawkes is apparently legitimately competing in the next space race with five guys, some HP workstations and Autodesk software. Sure Hawkes work is also familiar to us all the way back to Cubby Broccoli and the Bond films, and he works with the Camerons and Vince Pace too, along with Nat’l Geo, Discovery, BBC, providing his remarkable vehicles for movies and documentaries. But that’s just the day job part of the story. Hawkes is after something much bigger. He claims his band of scientists and engineers are able to do the simulation work of government R&D departments with their trusty liottle range of HP xw4300 (Intel), xw9300 (AMD), and xw8200 (Intel) workstations.

Now, Hawkes is taking delivery of the new HP xw4400 workstation. This upgrade to the entry-level xw4300 puts Intel’s new screaming Duo chips to work. If the initial reports from all over the computing community are right–Hawkes will be receiving a burst of power that may indeed help take him to the bottom of the sea.