Dell Precision R5500: Workstation performance in a compact package, all managed remotely with a thin client on the desk
If you happened to be in Seattle last week (sadly we weren’t) you may have come across an interesting demo featuring Siemens NX software and Dell’s Precision R5500 Rack workstation.
Dell showed how an engineer could remotely control an interactive, graphics intensive mechanical design session in Siemens NX over a LAN network using its Teradici-based rack workstation technology.
The main rationale for doing this is security (as only dumb pixel data ever leaves the data centre) centralised IT, and more flexibility as staff don’t have to work in a fixed location.
Also on show were new GPU compute versions of the Dell Precision T5500 and Precision T7500 tower workstations and the Precision R5500 rack workstation, with all three featuring an Nvidia Tesla C2075 GPU compute board and Nvidia’s new Maximus technology.
We ran a blog post on Maximus last week, but here’s a quick recap. Using one Quadro GPU and one Tesla GPU, the unified Maximus driver makes sure both devices can work at the same time to their full potential – with the Quadro reserved exclusively for 3D graphics and the Tesla for compute intensive simulation or rendering. According to Nvidia, before Maximus, rendering or simulation applications that supported GPU compute could sometimes get confused as to which GPU they should be using, which could cause the workstation to grind to a halt.
