Serial or Simultaneous Workflows - Which one do you want? Part 1
Extreme performance and extreme visualization found in today's Intel® Xeon® based workstations are combining to help change the way users work. What that means, is users from manufacturing to oil and gas to digital media can now create parallel workflows to aide them in compressing the time it takes to transform complex data into actionable information.
Today's workstations, with 8 cores and over 100 GFLOPS(1) of 64 bit computing performance, actually resemble yesterday's high performance supercomputers. With two slight twists; these supercomputers can be:
at your desk, and
have the ability to integrate high powered graphics.
I like to call these workstations - workstation supercomputers and they can help you and your teams innovate faster.
This new workstation breed potentially offers users an opportunity for faster insight, as they:
help users move from smaller incomplete models to
larger sub assemblies orcreate and render complex scenes simultaneously or
increase a reservoir model's complexity by adding more physics or even
aide power office users perform complicated and data-intensive office functions concurrently.
Net result is, the new workstation supercomputers can help you get more done in less time when you choose to use their available resources to change the way you work and employ simultaneous workflows.
Simultaneous workflows means users can elect to do more than one task at a time on their workstation with out fear of the dreaded hour glass. That single miscue, the hour glass, serves to inhibit your innovation. It single handily stops your what if thought process and forces to abandon an innovative idea before it even got past the idea stage.
Simultaneous workflows, enabled on today's workstations, can change the way you work and give you an opportunity to potentially innovate faster than ever before.
Let me know where see opportunities to work in parallel or simultaneous workflows and what benefits you or your organization may be able to be to accomplish.
My next blog will look at the manufacturing industry and what parallel workflows may look like there.
To leverage high-performance workstations is less about concurrent workflows and more about the user's ability to understand how to fit their computational problem in their work day/week/month.
Secondly, the HPC software industry is virtually non-existing, so unless you develop your own software you are completely dependent on your ISV to deliver concurrent features. Most of them license their software in very restricted ways complicating how to run multiple studies concurrently.
Experience with cluster operations shows that keeping the system busy is a big challenge. My postulate is that most of the quad and oct-core systems out there will run idle most of the time; The multi-core systems are limited by the ISVs to reduce your latency on individual computations and most tasks do not generate enough concurrency to keep all the cores doing useful work.,