Articles tagged with Workstations

This is an interesting move by Dell, who has just launched a workstation specifically designed and certified for AutoCAD. OK, so the fact that it’s designed for AutoCAD is unlikely to make most DEVELOP3D readers sit up and take notice, but what they might find interesting is that the Precision T1500 is based on Intel’s new Core i5 (or Core i7) processors. This is a first from a major workstation manufacturer, whose current lines are predominantly made up of Intel Xeon processors, which are more expensive but don’t offer much additional benefit.

The main difference between Intel’s Core i5 / Core i7 and Xeon processors is that the Xeon supports ECC memory, which is designed to correct any data errors that may occur, a benefit that is pretty hard to quantify. Xeon is also the only Intel workstation processor that is available in pairs, which is often required for CAE and rendering.

With a choice of entry-level graphics in the form of AMD’s ATI FirePro V3750 or Nvidia’s Quadro FX 580, the Precision T1500 is a bit limited in its graphics options. However, what it may do is push the other workstation vendors to launch price-conscious Core i5 or Core i7 systems that raise the graphics performance just a little, making them ideal for most mid-range CAD applications.

With many rumours now linking Autodesk product development with Apple OSX ports, the company has created a web page to guide Mac users best-run Autodesk applications on their Intel-based Macintosh computers.

There are two levels of supported software: Mac compatible (native) and BootCamp-compatible. On first glance it’s pretty obvious that much of Autodesk’s OSX compatible software has come from acquisitions along the way; Alias Design, ImageModeler, Maya, Stitcher Unlimited and Mudbox to name but a few. However, Autodesk now offers support to users trying to run Inventor, AutoCAD, Max Design and the Revit suite running 32-bit Windows under BootCamp.

For those non-Mac users amongst our readers, Apple’s switch to Intel processors enables Macintoshes to run either Leopard OSX (a UNIX-based operating system) or Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 using an boot utility called BootCamp.

There are Windows emulation tools for the Mac, namely VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop, which enable Windows and OSX to run simultaneously. These are not supported directly by Autodesk although bloggers such as Autodesk’s Shaan Hurley has had some success in running AutoCAD software under emulation.

It’s a small but important statement by Autodesk. The company is now serious about Apple and looks set to develop more native CAD applications for this growing platform. Insiders at Autodesk have told me that AutoCAD for OSX is actively being considered, while Inventor for OSX would be a challenge but not impossible. The high percentage of Macs with students in Universities is being taken a lead indicator that there will be increased popularity of the platform in coming years, at the expense of Windows-based workstations.

#3: Despite being one of the most interesting technologies to appear at HP’s workstation event, it was surprising that this new workstation virtualisation technology was given so little stage time. Parallels Workstation Extreme enables users to run multiple Operating Systems on a single workstation, meaning Linux and Windows users don’t have to work with two workstations concurrently or resort to dual boot. But the real beauty of the technology is that it is claimed to run applications at 95-100% of their full speed.

I had a very interesting chat with James Raquepau, OEM Alliances Director, Parallels, who explained more about the technology and how he has already had interest from the automotive and aerospace sectors. For those that don’t know, Parallels is best known for its software that enables Windows to run at speed on Apple’s OS X. The new workstation-class product will do a similar thing for Windows and Linux so engineers could switch between their Linux-based CAE software and Windows-based design software, accessing the same data off the hard drive array, driving efficiency and reducing the costs and power requirements of maintaining two workstations.

Schlumberger, a specialist in the oil and gas sector, demonstrated Parallels Workstation Extreme at the event running on a HP Z800 workstation with two 30-inch monitors. It showed it running a Linux-based simulation using all eight cores while continuing to perform interactive 3D modelling operations under Windows at full speed. Changing control of the application was as simple as moving the mouse from one screen to the other with the keyboard following suit automatically.

Schlumberger’s excitement for the software was evident, particularly as many of its customers regularly need to run legacy Linux code alongside more modern Windows applications.

James Raquepau told me the requirements for the system are two identical graphics cards (HP currently supports Nvidia’s Quadro FX3800, FX4800, and FX5800), lots of memory and ideally a dual socket (CPU) workstation. The technology is made possible by new virtualization technology built into the new Intel technology and while it should run comfortably on any dual socket Intel Xeon 5500 platform, Parallels is initially partnering with HP for the launch of the product. It will retail for $399.

This looks to be an essential technology for those with multi OS requirements, and Raquepau also told me this could include those that want to work with the forthcoming Windows 7 whilst maintaining legacy Windows XP applications. Interesting times.

Jim Zafarana, Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Unit, Workstations, demonstrates HP’s new SkyRoom collaborative technology running SolidWorks’ eDrawings with a live connection to Jeff Wood, Director, worldwide workstation marketing

#2: For a few years now HP has had an excellent technology for collaboration, but a bit of a problem in communicating that to customers. The name, Remote Graphics Software (RGS), never exactly rolled off the tongue!

But now HP is in the process of re-branding and re-packaging its proprietary compression technology and combining it with its high-end Halo Studio technology to form a product that it is going to call HP SkyRoom.

HP describes SkyRoom as a ‘professional-quality visual collaboration and conferencing solution that preserves the value of highly personal human interaction.’ In short it combines video conferencing in a collaborative design environment where users can share any application on each other’s desktops, but at a much higher quality and frame rates than can be achieved with current generation tools

Jim Zafarana, Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Unit, Workstations, demonstrated the technology with Jeff Wood, Director, worldwide workstation marketing, over a TCP/IP network and the results were superb. The technology also appeared incredibly easy to use. Zafarana simply highlighted the portion of the screen to share (demonstrated using SolidWorks eDrawings). Up to four people can be connected at one time and they can also see what is in the ‘lens’.

The software is being architected to run on multi-core systems and also supports HyperThreading with Jeff Wood stating that the experience would be much richer on these systems. The base line of a Dual Core 2GHz machine was also mentioned. However, HP chose not to talk about bandwidth requirements as the product is still in beta at customer sites. With this in mind I’m a bit skeptical of how good an experience users will get over the Internet, or indeed if this system is designed to work on such bandwidth limited connections. I guess we will find out more when this collaborative design technology is launched later this year, which incidentally will run on all hardware and not just HP’s.

Dell officially unveiled its new range of workstation-class systems today with the launch of the Precision T3500, T5500 and T7500. Like all new workstations being announced this week, the new Precision family is based on Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series (Nehalem) architecture, which offers incredible power for multi-threaded applications; particularly those that take advantage of HyperThreading, such as 3ds Max and HyperShot.

Like most of the major workstation vendors, Dell has bypassed Intel’s Core i7 platform for its new Precisions, instead waiting for ECC (Error Correcting Code) memory for better accuracy, which is not supported on Core i7. The new Xeon platform also, uniquely, supports Direct Cache Access (DCA) which enables the cache of inactive cores to be accessed by those that are active.

Dell has expanded its range of graphics options with new cards from Nvidia including the Quadro FX 580, FX 1800 and FX 3800, but has also increased the number of AMD ATI FirePro cards it carries in the range with standard options available on the FirePro V3750, V5700 and V8700. Up to two Quadro FX4800 and FX5800 are available in the high-end T7500.

Acoustics has been a major design concentration for the new Precisions with low duty fans aiding the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) designed airflow. Dell has also done a lot of research into ‘what if’ scenarios, modelling what would happen if one vent was blocked off, for example.

In terms of machine positioning, the single socket T3500 will take up the entry-level role, but Dell will continue to offer the Core 2 Duo-based T3400 for those on incredibly tight budgets. The mid-range T5500 is a particularly interesting machine, specifically because Dell has managed to pack so much technology into such as small chassis. Dell gave DEVELOP3D a sneak preview of the machine and we were astounded by the engineering that has gone into this, with the second processor and memory located at 90 degrees to the motherboard on a riser card. With such a small footprint, however, the T5500 is fairly limited in its expandability and this is where the T7500 fits in with capacity for up 192GB RAM and a ridiculous amount of hard drives. It also includes an on-board SAS controller.

While the new systems will ship with Windows Vista by default, Dell will continue to offer Windows XP downgrades (with XP recovery disks) as well as Linux. However, thorough its custom factory integration program Dell can supply workstations with XP pre-installed, and it is also possible for customers to supply disk images for Operating System, network and applications, which Dell installs prior to shipping.

Dell is also in the process of developing a new Flash-driven workstation advisor website, which is designed to make it easier for customers to choose workstations according to which applications they use. This is coming in Q2 2009.

Look out for review of the new Precision range soon.

Today Lenovo became the first of the dedicated workstation manufacturers to announce its new generation Intel Xeon (Nehalem) based workstation range. Pipping Dell and HP to the post, Lenovo’s new ThinkStation S20 and D20 feature single socket and dual socket versions of Intel’s new Core i7-based Xeon chip.

In addition to offering both AMD (ATI) and Nvidia graphics cards, the big news is that Lenovo is pushing Nvidia’s Tesla GPU platform to supplement the jaw dropping performance of Intel’s new chips. For those that don’t know, Nvidia’s Tesla cards look like a graphics card and feature virtually the same technology as a graphics card, but are designed specifically to carry out compute tasks usually done on the CPU. Like all new technologies though, we are still waiting for the applications to come, most likely in the areas of simulation and rendering.

Elsewhere, Lenovo is boasting some pretty impressive green credentials, claiming that both workstations use 50% recycled content.

Look out for a full review review soon.

www.lenovo.com

HP has unveiled its latest slice of technology designed with the CAD market in mind, the trim ThinClient workstation, based on the AMD Turion Dual Core 2.3-Ghz processor.

Roberto Moctezuma, vice president and general manager, desktop solutions organization, HP, said: “This latest technology from HP removes one of the last remaining barriers to transitioning to a virtual client infrastructure for customers who require the highest levels of processing power or high-quality multimedia capabilities.”

The gt7725 is shown as viewing multi-display, two- and three-dimensional MCAD designs, engineering simulation results for computational fluid dynamics and rendering images. Advanced system performance is also promised through configured dual channel memory with optimized data throughput.

Available from January, this could be a useful addition for designers wanting to work from home, pushed for space and needing a light workstation; they can also take advantage of the pre-installed HP remote graphics software. Allowing the user to work closely with remotely in a secure, collaborative environment, the system should eliminate the need to upgrade to an expensive 3D graphics card on each user’s machine.

Autodesk’s Subscription to date, has been little more than paying for the next release, which has settled into a yearly cycle around the March time-frame. One would hope that in the concept of a yearly subscription you would get more than one update. Looking at Bentley’s SELECT subscription it’s hard to tell what the feature set of MicroStation is, as it changes every month and quarter. Autodesk started out by streaming features and updates randomly through the year but this didn’t work and so fell back on paying for the next release. The company also monkied with the upgrade fees making Autodesk Subscription the most cost effective way of owning any Autodesk product.

It’s hard to generate good customer spirit if updates are sold on cost of ownership and you are literally paying for the next release - which they may or may not even use. While Autodesk has benefitted greatly from the increase in regular revenue, Autodesk Subscription has been suffering from a little complacency.

The good news is that Autodesk’s AutoCAD product team has launched ‘Flexible Software Delivery’, which harks back to a more traditional concept, where updates and new features are added when they are ready, as opposed to when the next major release comes around. this means the software is delivered on demand. No more boxes hanging around and you can select what features you want.

So in addition to the yearly update, there will be Subscription Bonus packs which will include early releases of upcoming features. the first one is scheduled for July 24th and will include several AUGi wish-list items. These will only be available to subscribers. Also Product updates, for all customers, will replace service packs, to fix bugs and drivers.

One wonders if this will be copied across Autodesk’s many Divisions? The complexity of non-synchronized change across Autodesk’s products was the downfall at the first attempt, we will have to wait to see as to how this invigoration of Subscription works out.

It’s been a long time coming, but HP has finally released a Blade Workstation solution specifically designed for the MCAD market. The concept is that you run all your CAD/CAM/CAE applications on a rack of blades which are locked away in a secure data centre and the end user works on their designs using a thin client at the desktop, which can be anywhere in the world.

All data remains on the blade and only pixel information is squirted down the line to a thin client using HP’s Remote Graphics Technology. The client only needs a relatively small processor, memory and not even a 3D graphics card. It might sound like wouldn’t work due to bandwidth issues but I saw this running on a Blade Workstation with a low end Nvidia Quadro FX560 graphics card last year and it worked a treat and HP claims it even works over the Internet.

What’s new about this release is that HP has upped the graphics card to a FX 1600, which gives it a bit more power for serious 3D users. However, it’s interesting that it has taken HP so long to get this new model out as this was originally scheduled for release a year ago. My guess is that HP came across thermal problems. We’ll find out more soon.

Anyway, it’s an interesting technology, which boasts better data security as no actual CAD files leave the blade, easier control as IT staff don’t have to support individual workstations, and no whirring fans under your desk. Watch this space for a full review soon.

www.hp.com/go/bladeworkstations