“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” Albert Einstein

Today’s workstation can provide you with a magnificent digital canvas to create tomorrow today.

With workstations powered by two Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors, engineers have the opportunity to create, shape, test and modify products before they become real. Engineers can now design, visualize and simulate products from the conceptual design phase through the entire manufacturing process. This is done virtually before any investments are made in a prototype.

“Experiment fearlessly.” “Innovation is bloody random.” Tom Peters

Peters, a world renowned author and management consultant, recognized that innovation is more art than science.

Consider this example: Taking innovation to an entirely new level, Boeing, in the late 1990s, employed a process known as algorithmic design to see what designs might be viable to meet a specified hypersonic aircraft design criteria. The algorithmic design process enabled computers to create and test new ideas against the specified design criteria without human intervention. As a result, more models were evaluated in less time, and a vehicle that was counterintuitive to what many engineers may have thought possible was evaluated. Innovation just accelerated.

Intel technology has seen dramatic changes since Boeing first tested the idea of algorithmic design in the last decade. Workstation performance has gone up Dual-processor workstations have yielded to workstations with two processors, eight cores and 16 computational threads. Science or simulation that was never tractable on a workstation before is now standard, and it is getting faster.

“I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.” Wilbur Wright

You think all you need is an entry-level workstation with a single Intel® Xeon® processor.                       After all , you only do CAD—right?

However, as you begin to adopt modern workflows and realize the dramatic impact that simulation-based engineering or digital prototyping can have on your product development cost and schedules, you realize that the cost of the second processor and additional memory necessary to support digital prototyping was far less expensive than the cost of multiple physical prototypes and the associated time to produce them. Instead of investigating hundreds of digital prototypes, you only have time to look at a single physical prototype and ask: What if I …?

Those “what ifs” could have been played out on a dual-processor Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based digital workbench faster, and your time and cost of physical prototypes could have been significantly reduced.

A virtual workstation uses both virtualization hardware and software technologies that, when combined, provides end users with an uncompromised workstation experience.  It gives engineers and IT user’s concurrent access to key workstation hardware functions previously not available with traditional virtualization technologies. Through this approach, you get near native access to key workstation services, such as those delivered by graphics cards or NICS, needed to run multiple high-performance applications regardless of the operating system they run on. . Best of all, with Intel® Virtualization technology for directed I/O, delivered by Parallels Workstation Extreme, you will be able to leverage this new virtual workstation capability in ways that improve workflows across operating systems while reducing IT management requirements.  This is a win/win for both you and IT.

Ok we have segregated compute resources between IT and the user. 

What can you get with Intel’s VT/d technology? 

How many times have you been faced with a need to run an application that runs on a prehistoric OS, or that runs 32 bit OS when your entire environment is running on 64 bit? Or maybe you need run two different graphics-intensive workloads in a LINUX and Microsoft Windows® environment.  With Intel VT-d and Parallels™ Workstation Extreme software you may be able to do just that at near-native speeds.

What else can you do with a virtualized workstation?

Have you ever been in a situation where one application requires version X and another application you use daily requires version Y of the same OS.  With Intel VT/d and Parallels™ Extreme® software you may be able run both at near native performance at the same time.  No rebooting, no dual booting or emulation required.  Just fast, seamless answers to complex problems – across multiple segments like Oil & Gas, DCC, Manufacturing, and Research.

Ever hear of a digital workbench?

It is a tool that designers and engineers use to perform what many call digital prototyping or simulation based engineering.  It is usually a set of tools that combine needs for LINUX and Microsoft Window® based applications to create and test their ideas.  Think of a virtual wind tunnel where simulations are performed in a LINUX environment and the design and visualization is performed in a friendly Microsoft Windows® environment.  With Intel VT-d and Parallels Workstation Extreme you can do both at near native speed.  That means interactive product development and engineering, and that leads to potentially better deigns in less time.

Do you need a virtualized workstation?

If you have a need to run applications in different OSes, diverse OS levels or types, or you need to visualize in different OSes, then answer is probably yes.

To learn more about Intel Virtualization Technology please visit www.intel.com/go/workstation.

To see an online demo of Parallels™ Workstation Extreme software please visit http://www.parallels.com/products/extreme

At Intel when we think of scaling performance forward we think of one word, evolution, not revolution.

By evolution we mean developing high performance computing solutions that offer you the balance your applications require in order to deliver the best performance they can.  We do not maximize processor performance without matching it with the necessary memory capacity, bandwidth and system i/o.  We look to match these important components of performance to insure the data is where it needs to be, when it is needed to be in order to quickly and efficiently change it into actionable information.  We maximize your performance by minimizing your latencies.

Maximize your performance today, simplify your software development needs, and scale your performance forward as newer microarchitectures debut.

Seamless performance – bigger science – that is what we help you achieve faster than ever before.

To learn more about our approach to delivering highly effective HPC processors and software tools come to the Sun HPC Virtual Tradeshow on September 17th 2009 starting at 8am PDT.  In the virtual event attend the Intel presentation on “Accelerating Your Applications And Scaling It Forward” by Wes Shimanek & Dr. Nash Palaniswamy at 10:30am PDT.

Your most valuable employee is the one that creates tomorrow’s successes.  Providing them tools that help them do that faster will help your organization create new products or optimize old ones more rapidly.  The benefit to the organization is increased opportunities to win the customer’s attention via new products or your responsiveness to their request; the employee gets to brag on what he or she just helped bring to market.

Before we get too far let’s look at Intel’s mission with respect to workstations.  We are laser focused on supplying technology that provides users with an uncompromised experience in transforming their ideas into reality.  With that in mind we look at how users create; we try understanding their obstacles and work with the ecosystem of hardware and software providers to deliver solutions to real problems that may be inhibiting their opportunity to innovate.  

One technology that is helping users innovate faster is virtualization. 

No, we are not looking to remove the workstation from the user’s desk or share his or her workstation with peers, who also need a workstation.  We are using virtualization to deliver the performance they need to innovate faster.

The Observation

We saw workstation user’s innovation slow as they multitasked between tasks – some of them not even theirs.  The involuntary tasks included deploying IT security patches, updates, and system backups to name a few.  We also saw that users were no longer just doing Computer Aided Design (CAD) alone, but they were doing CAD, using productivity tools, meshing, web surfing for supporting facts, collaborating via video and Instant Messaging (IM) tools, digital white boarding and trying to do analysis-driven design.  They were very busy people who can’t afford any downtime or slow time.

In some cases we noticed that some users actually had not one, but two or more workstations running in completely different environments, many times with different OSs.

The Problem

What the above really lead to is a conclusion that too many tasks were going after too few resources and that the experience we had hoped the user would encounter was not happening.  In fact the reverse was happening – interactive creative tasks were slowing, system sluggishness was at an all time high.  The “uncompromised experience in transforming their ideas into reality” we wanted for a workstation user was not there and any innovation that was possible was slowed down to a crawl.

A Potential Solution

Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d), once just thought of for servers actually has a place in the workstation market. 

This technology provides an important step toward enabling a significant set of emerging usage models in the workstation. VT-d support on Intel platforms provides the capability to ensure improved isolation of I/O resources for greater reliability, security, and availability.  That is a mouth full let’s see it in action.

There are two key requirements that are common across workstation usage models.

1.       The first requirement is protected access to I/O resources from a given virtual machine (VM), such that it cannot interfere with the operation of another VM on the same platform. This isolation between VMs is essential for achieving availability, reliability, and trust. This helps you get the performance you want from your workstation.

2.       The second major requirement is the ability to share I/O resources among multiple VMs. In many cases, it is not practical or cost-effective to replicate I/O resources (such as storage or network controllers) for each VM on a given platform.

In the case of the workstation, virtualization can be used to create a self-contained operating environment, or "virtual software appliance[RC1] ," that is dedicated to capabilities such as manageability or security. These capabilities generally need protected and secure access to a network device to communicate with down-the-wire management agents and to monitor network traffic for security threats. For example, a security agent within a VM requires protected access to the actual network controller hardware. This agent can then intelligently examine network traffic for malicious payloads or suspected intrusion attempts before the network packets are passed to the guest OS, where user applications might be affected. Workstations can also use this technique for management, security, content protection, and a wide variety of other dedicated services. The type of service deployed may dictate that various types of I/O resources, graphics, network, and storage devices, be isolated from the OS where the user's applications are running.

The Result

In collaborating with virtualization and automation leader, Parallels, on its Parallels Workstation Extreme solution,  we identified two impediments to workstation user productivity.  The first was the issue around general resource overhead that afflict a traditional virtualized workstation system due to  insufficient resources to address the overload of requests. The second issue explored includes the more complex problem of a single workstation with the need to support multiple OSs and display visualization programs at near- or full-performance within virtualized machines.

The first issue was more straightforward - create VMs, partition resources and now the user has a very resilient workstation that is capable of delivering the intended experience.  IT can have their VMs and the user has his or her workstation back and the concept of digital prototyping to create and explore a complete product before it is built is a reality.  The creative innovator in the company can now iterate through more ideas in less time and your company created more opportunities to catch the customer’s attention just went through the roof.

The second issue offered a more complex challenge.  We identified certain industries such as the oil and gas exploration space where users actually had two or more physical workstations - one running Windows, the other running Linux. Both workstations had visual display requirements by the end user and both computers acted on the same reservoir data with applications that while similar in many ways, were still different in their functionalities and purpose.  In oil drilling projects that typically involve millions of dollars in capital investment, the confirmation of expected end results is an asset that far outweigh the costs of a few workstations. Nevertheless, in today’s economic setting, the ability to get the same functionalities at a lower cost is one of many key drivers in helping companies achieve healthy bottom lines.

The Proof Point For Virtualization In A Workstation Engineers from Schlumberger, a leading oil field service provider, run performance-demanding applications such as GeoFrame* and Petrel*.  These applications serve to analyze complex geological and geophysical data and determine the viability of potential reservoirs, or to optimize production at existing sites. With GeoFrame running on Linux* and Petrel on Microsoft Windows*, Schlumberger engineers have been using these applications on two separate physical workstations, driving IT spending higher, pushing down user productivity and increasing both power consumption and IT maintenance costs.

A New Paradigm For A New Day

With the availability of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations, game-changing workstation virtualization software such as Parallels Workstation Extreme has opened up new horizons with breakthrough graphics performance with Intel’s latest processor technology. Parallels Workstation Extreme is built on top of the Parallels FastLane Architecture that effectively leverages the full potential of hardware resources such as graphics and networking cards to offer optimal workstation performance.

In comparison testing, Schlumberger compared the concurrent performance of applications running side-by-side on a virtualized Intel Xeon processor 5400 series-based workstation with the same setup on the newer Intel Xeon processor 5500-based machine. The results were astounding. The first machine with the older processor without Intel-VT-d support ran Petrel on the host OS at full native speed, but performance for GeoFrame in a VM slowed enormously. While Petrel refreshed its graphics at a rate of 30 frames per second, GeoFrame crawled along at a graphics refresh rate of JUST one frame every 19 seconds, an agonizingly slow performance on an older workstation without Intel VT-d support.

When the group tested the same applications on the newer Xeon 5500 series workstation with Intel VT-d support, the results were striking: Both applications – Petrel running on the host OS and GeoFrame in a guest OS in a VM - ran at full native speed, and both were able to refresh graphics at near 30 frames per second—a 570 times improvement over the first workstation.

Russ Sagert, Schlumberger’s Geoscience Technical Advisor for North America said “our engineers were blown away by the performance. We hammered these machines with extreme workloads that stressed every aspect of the system. Amazingly, the new workstation based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series provided performance enabling this multiple OS, multiple application environment for the first time.”

The key element in Schlumberger’s new environment is Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d).  Together, these technologies enable direct assignment of graphics and network cards to virtual machines, enabling the machine to circumvent the interrupt and exit loop and clearing the previous performance problems.

Running in conjunction with Parallels Workstation Extreme, which effectively leverages Intel Virtualization Technology, including VT-d, the solution revolutionizes virtualization for high-end users. “High-performance virtualization on Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations is a game-changing capability,” says Sagert. “We can allocate multiple cores, up to 64 GB of memory and a dedicated graphics card to each machine. The results are spectacular.”

In the final analysis, moving to the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series of next-generation workstations does far more than cut costs. It impacts the way that work gets done. If you have clients running the kind of resource-intensive, graphics-rich applications that traditionally slow to a crawl in a virtualized environment, consider the benefits of finally moving beyond the I/O barrier.

A fully configured Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series-based workstation running Parallels Workstation Extreme delivers the performance level that makes a virtualized workstation a leading contender for users with multi-workstation requirements. A streamlined work interface, reduced office noise and clutter, access to the same data repository and significant performance gains works on the user side. But the IT organization also gains benefits by lowering capital, management, support, provisioning, data protection, space, and energy and cooling costs.

Moreover, the IT team can now standardize on a single OS image while addressing alternative requirements.

Learn More

Intel Workstation Processors http://www.intel.com/products/workstation/processors/index.htm

Parallels Workstation Extreme

http://www.parallels.com/products/extreme

Your most valuable employee is the one that creates tomorrow’s successes.  Providing them tools that help them do that faster will help your organization create new products or optimize old ones more rapidly.  The benefit to the organization is increased opportunities to win the customers attention via new products or your responsiveness to their request; the employee gets to brag on what he or she just helped bring to market.

Before we get to far let’s look at Intel’s mission with respect to workstations.  We are laser focused on supplying technology that provides users with an uncompromised experience in transforming their ideas into reality.  With that in mind we look at how users create; we try understanding their obstacles and work with the ecosystem of hardware and software providers to deliver solutions to real problems that may be inhibiting their opportunity to innovate.  

One technology that is helping users innovate faster is virtualization. 

The Observation

We saw workstation user’s innovation slow as they multitasked between tasks – some of them not even theirs.  The involuntary task included IT security patches, updates, and system backups to name a few.  We also saw that users were no longer just doing CAD, but they were doing CAD, using productivity tools, meshing, web surfing for supporting facts, collaborating via video, digital white boarding and trying to do analysis driven design.  They were very busy people.

In some cases we noticed that some users actually had not one, but two workstations running in completely different environments, many times different OS’s.

The Problem

What the above really lead to is a conclusion that too many task were going after too few resources and that the experience we had hoped the user would encounter was not happening.  In fact the reverse was happening – interactive creative task were slowing, system sluggishness was at an all time high.  The “uncompromised experience in transforming their ideas into reality” we wanted for a workstation user was not there and any innovation that was possible was slowed down to a crawl.

A Potential Solution

Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O, once just thought of for servers actually has a place in the workstation market. 

This technology provides an important step toward enabling a significant set of emerging usage models in the workstation. VT-d support on Intel platforms provides the capability to ensure improved isolation of I/O resources for greater reliability, security, and availability.  That is a mouth full let’s see it in action.

There are two key requirements that are common across workstation usage models.

1.       The first requirement is protected access to I/O resources from a given virtual machine (VM), such that it cannot interfere with the operation of another VM on the same platform. This isolation between VMs is essential for achieving availability, reliability, and trust.

2.       The second major requirement is the ability to share I/O resources among multiple VMs. In many cases, it is not practical or cost-effective to replicate I/O resources (such as storage or network controllers) for each VM on a given platform.

In the case of the workstation, virtualization can be used to create a self-contained operating environment, or "virtual appliance," that is dedicated to capabilities such as manageability or security. These capabilities generally need protected and secure access to a network device to communicate with down-the-wire management agents and to monitor network traffic for security threats. For example, a security agent within a VM requires protected access to the actual network controller hardware. This agent can then intelligently examine network traffic for malicious payloads or suspected intrusion attempts before the network packets are passed to the guest OS, where user applications might be affected. Workstations can also use this technique for management, security, content protection, and a wide variety of other dedicated services. The type of service deployed may dictate that various types of I/O resources, graphics, network, and storage devices, be isolated from the OS where the user's applications are running.

The Result

Working with Parallels Workstation Extreme VM application we looked at two problems.  First was the general overhead related to too many request and too few resources and then we explored the more complex problem of a single workstation with a need to display at near native performance in two different OS’s.

The former was straight forward, create VM’s, partition resources and your innovator now has a very resilient workstation that is capable of delivering the intended experience.  IT can have their VM’s and the user has his or her workstation back and the concept of digital prototyping to create and explore a complete product before it is built is a reality.  Your innovator can now iterate through more ideas in less time and your company’s opportunity to catch the customer’s attention just went through the roof.

The former provided a much harder challenge.  We tested the idea in the oil and gas market where users actually had two workstations; one running Windows, one running LINUX. Both had a requirement for visual display and both acted on that same reservoir data with applications that while similar in many ways, they were still different.  When preparing to drill a multimillion dollar well – the idea of more data saying the same thing is a very good thing.

The Proof Point For Virtualization In A Workstation Engineers from Schlumberger, a leading oil field service provider, run performance-demanding applications such as GeoFrame* and Petrel*.  These applications serve to analyze complex geologic and geophysical data and determine the viability of potential reservoirs, or to optimize production at existing sites. With GeoFrame running on Linux* and Petrel on Microsoft Windows*, Schlumberger engineers have been running these applications on two separate workstations, driving down productivity and increasing both power consumption and IT maintenance costs.

A New Paradigm

With the advent of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations running Parallels Workstation Extreme, virtualization software has opened new horizons with breakthrough graphics performance.

Schlumberger compared the concurrent performance of applications running on a virtualized Intel Xeon processor 5400 series-based workstation with the same setup on the Intel Xeon processor 5500-based machine. The results were astounding. The first machine ran Petrel at full native speed, but performance for GeoFrame slowed enormously. While Petrel refreshed its graphics at a rate of 30 frames per second, GeoFrame crawled along at a graphics refresh rate of JUST one frame every 19 seconds, an agonizingly slow performance.

When the group tested both applications on the Xeon 5500 series workstation, the results were striking: Both applications ran at full native speed, and both were able to refresh graphics at 30 frames per second—a 570 times improvement over the first workstation.

Russ Sagert, Schlumberger’s Geoscience Technical Advisor for North America said “our engineers were blown away by the performance. We hammered these machines with extreme workloads that stressed every aspect of the system. Amazingly, the new workstation based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series provided performance enabling this multiple OS, multiple application environment for the first time.”

The key element in Schlumberger’s new environment is Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d).  Together, these technologies enable direct assignment of graphics and network cards to virtual machines, enabling the machine to circumvent the interrupt and exit loop and clearing the previous performance problems.

Running in conjunction with Parallels Workstation Extreme, which effectively leverages Intel Virtualization Technology, including VT-d, the solution revolutionizes virtualization for high-end users. “High-performance virtualization on Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations is a game-changing capability,” says Sagert. “We can allocate multiple cores, up to 64 GB of memory and a dedicated graphics card to each machine. The results are spectacular.”

In the final analysis, moving to the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series of next-generation workstations does far more than cut costs. It impacts the way that work gets done. If you have clients running the kind of resource-intensive, graphics-rich applications that traditionally slow to a crawl in a virtualized environment, consider the benefits of finally moving beyond the I/O barrier.

A fully configured Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series-based workstation running Parallels Workstation Extreme delivers the performance level that makes virtualization a contender for these users. A streamlined work interface, reduced office noise and clutter, and significant performance gains works on the user side. But the IT organization also gains benefits by lowering capital, management, support, space, and energy costs.

Moreover, the IT team can now standardize on a single OS image while addressing alternative requirements.

Learn More

Intel Workstation Processors http://www.intel.com/products/workstation/processors/index.htm

Parallels Workstation Extreme

http://www.parallels.com/products/extreme

Go Beyond the Kernel:

Refocusing HPC Benchmarking on Total Application Performance

Want to improve application performance by 10x or 100x? Few HPC customers would say no. Yet in some cases, the promises of tremendous performance improvements from accelerators, attached processors, field-programmable gate arrays, and the like evaporate when total application performance is evaluated. Benchmarks that focus on kernel or even partial application performance provide incomplete picture with respect to the impact on total application benchmarking.  While difficult, HPC customers should look to test total application performance.

Why benchmark?

Benchmarking is an essential means for helping end users choose and configure HPC systems. An end user has a problem and needs to know the best way to solve it. More specifically, the end user has a specific workload to run and needs to find hardware that can deliver the best performance, reliability, application portability, and ease of application maintenance. As Purdue University researchers wrote in a recent IEEE article that argued for real application benchmarking, an HPC benchmark should, among other things, produce metrics that help customers evaluate the overall or total time to solution for their problems.

The claim of a 10x to 100x improvement from a particular product can easily grab someone’s attention. But what does that 10x measurement really mean? In many cases, these claims are derived from kernel or partial application benchmarking, which might fail to tell the whole story. While an increase in floating-point performance or the addition of a CPU accelerator could deliver a significant improvement for one kernel, the total application improvement depends on additional HPC system elements. As one participant argued in a recent HPC conference reported by IDC, solution time can be represented as an equation:

Solution time = processing time + memory time + communication time + I/O time – all four combine to form total application time.  The Caveat Emptor is to make sure you analyze your application; understanding what you are measuring and ensuring that you have the balanced architecture to deliver the best performance.  I am biased but I think Intel’s soon to be announced Nehalem processor delivers just that. 

Kernel benchmarking has its place, but benchmarking total (or “real”) application performance is critical for accurately evaluating HPC systems.

Today's workstation with (2) Intel® Xeon® 5400 Series processors transforms a workstation from a simple design terminal into a powerful engineering tool that helps users potentially compress the time between an idea and a product. At Intel we call that "working differently". In the manufacturing vertical market it may also be called:

• digital prototyping,

• analysis driven design or

• simulation based product design.

No matter what you call it, these new ways of working help manufacturers virtually explore complete products before they are built-so they can create, validate, optimize, and manage designs from the conceptual design phase through the manufacturing process.

Digital prototyping processes may also require that you also rethink your workstation deployment strategy; moving from single processor workstations, to two (2) Intel Xeon 5400 processor based workstations with 8 computational cores and up to 100 peak gigaflops of floating point performance. This compute capacity coupled with the robust visualization environment enabled by two (2) PCI Gen 2 graphics adapters changes would be workstations into workstation supercomputers and enables engineers and designers to concurrently perform traditional CAD design as well moderate size analysis (e.g. over 5M degrees of freedom finite element modeling jobs or up to 10M cell fluid dynamic simulations).

This combination (CAD and Analysis) can help organization optimize CAD parts or assemblies under a wide range of physical scenarios including mechanical and thermal effects. Net result is workstation supercomputers based on Intel® Xeon® 5400 Series processor can help to bring higher quality or more innovative ideas to markets faster than ever before.