The Golden Age of Workstations is Back

Back in the day, we CAD guys would sit like kings in front of real workstations. Our computers ran CAD software, for God's sake, not word processing. Yeah, our machines cost big bucks, so did the software -- but we were worth it! After all, we were the ones sent away for weeks of training, sat in specially constructed climate controlled rooms, and in general had the rest of the company revolve around us. It was a golden age.

But the last few years have not been kind. We've long since lost the big buck workstations. Everyone is now on the same beige boxes. Heck, there's hardly a difference between the PCs the admins use and ours. We're starting to look like everyone else, just ordinary office workers.

J Ralls of Hewlett Packard demonstrates a dual Quad-Core workstation. Windows Task Manager shows usage for 8 CPUs.

But, take heart. Things are turning around. There is an increasing awareness for a need for real workstations again. That beige box may be fine for a couple of widgets, small assemblies, a little analysis but it is going to cough, splutter and die if you load it up with a model of central London (such as the one shown recently at Autodesk University) or ask for real time rendering of a building complex. Going away fast is the idea that you should be limited in size and scope in what you model and analyze just because of your computer. Now that everyone can model the landing gear of a plane in 3D, for example, the advantage goes to the company that can mesh and analyze it, render it in real time, show it in the context of the airplane, even the airport. On the AEC side, no longer are buildings shown static, just floorplans and elevations. No, the top firms are generating fly throughs, showing people moving and how the buildings will look in the street or complex with clouds moving overhead, at different times of the day or different seasons, and doing green building analyses.

If you want to make it this new world, you better not get another beige box. You'll need real speed, real graphics and real storage -- in short, a workstation!

Enter the Hewlett Packard xw8400. On display at AU 2006, this baby has not one but two Quad Core Intel processors! (Manly grunt here). That's a total of 8 cores waiting to do your bidding. It's like having a bank of computers all in one (non-biege) box. And if the peons are not properly impressed with your solid model assembly on a massive 30" display (top resolution of 2560x1600), you might mention that as you are finishing off  the solid model, your workstation is actually running a 100,000 degree of freedom model in the background ("You can't tell, can you?") and, oh, yes, you are sending off some drawings to the plotter, running a virus check and downloading email.

Oh, dear. You can't do that on your beige box? I'm so sorry. Now excuse me while I take back my rightful place in the company.

Comments

[Vladimir Malukh]

Yep, the era of "proper" workstations for CAD is seems coming back. But multi-core processors, to my view, is not the major issue. What we (CAD users and developers) will get most of benefit in nearest future – 64-bit architecture (which will simplify our life with large assemblies for example, but not only), new (in fact good old) input devices like pen-enabled screens with large resolution, hardware accelerated vector-graphics (in the past years 3D visualization was “sponsored” mostly by games industry, but gaming do not require fast vectors).

[Jason]

SolidWorks does take advantage of Multi-CPUs in some areas like Photoworks and FEA. It also uses them when loading part files in large assembly drawings enabling you to work on the drawing while it loads in the background.

The hard part seems to be rebuilding the part history tree which is very linear by nature. On large complex parts with several hundred features, processor speed is most important.

[rtara]

Good point, Ralph. I don't know of any design software that takes advantage of multi-core processors. Software would have to be re-written as mutli-threaded to take advantage of multi-core processors.

The benefit at the moment is in multi-tasking. Multiple applications will naturally find and use idle processors, like in the example I used where an analysis is taking place at full speed in the background and design in happening unaffected in the foreground.

This is a case of "build it and they will come." Autodesk has stated that they will add support for multi-core -- and 64-bit OS -- "pretty soon." I expect other CAD software (especially MCAD software) to act even faster.

[Tony in SV]

Some analysis software might (e.g. FEA - I know a lot of chip design software can).

But in general, not much, and I don't think it's going to change quickly.

The fundamental problem is large parts of the software we use just isn't that parallel. Secondly, it's hard to write parallel software - threading is hard to get right (I have some experience there), and the alternate approaches (e.g. Erlang) are culture shock to most current software developers.

Summary: most software will have to be completely rewritten to take advantage of 8 cores, and even then it might not be much faster.

--Tony

[Ralph Grabowski]

Which software takes advantage of 8 CPUs running on one motherboard?