Khronos Prepares ANARI 1.0 API For Scalable 3D Data Visualization

The Khronos Group this morning is rolling out the provisional specification for ANARI 1.0, its newest royalty-free, industry-standard API.

ANARI is the Khronos API focused on analytic rendering and scalable 3D data visualization.

The Khronos Group describes their ANARI 1.0 milestone as "ANARI 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. In addition to the ANARI specification, Khronos has released a sample implementation, starter applications, developer tools and conformance tests into open source - and welcomes community feedback before specification finalization in 2022."

The ANARI effort has the backing from the likes of VMD and VTK/ParaView. Early ANARI implementations are in the works by AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA that will in turn make use of Radeon ProRender, OSPray, and VisRTX engines, respectively.

ANARI is platform-independent, based on C99 and C++, and designed for scalable rendering across distributed compute and rendering resources.

The ANARI specification should be available shortly via GitHub. Khronos is also releasing the ANARI SDK as open-source software (Apache 2.0 license), which does include a sample CPU-based implementation.

The formal ANARI 1.0 specification release is expected in 2022. More details on ANARI at Khronos.org.