The Server Room Blog

'You are not Alone' - When it comes to moving from RISC

Why Are You Still Running Your CAD Application As 32 Bit Application?

Analysis Driven Design on a Digital Workbenches Powered by the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series

Workgroup Group Based Simulation – Accelerating Your Innovation

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0?

What is a digital workbench?

The Changing Face of the Digital Workstation

And the winner of the Intel Xeon Workstation Sweepstakes is...

I want my HPC….under my desk

The Changing Face of the Digital Workstation

What Exactly Is A Virtualized Workstation?

Title – How Much Memory Does Your 64 bit Workstation Really Need?

Enter the Intel® XEON® Workstation Sweepstakes

Nehalem-EX will bring a lot to the RISC party

Accelerating Your Innovation - Intel Xeon 5500 based workstations with Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:18:41 GMT

Change is hard, but it can be done and the benefits of change usually outweigh the concerns which were on our minds before we made the change.

When making the change from running your solution on a RISC architecture to running that solution on a Xeon architecture, the biggest concern usually relates to whether that solution will run at the same level as on the previous architecture. I'm not talking about performance specifically, but usually the question is around whether operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Solaris on Xeon will meet your business needs for yourmission critical solutions.

Like the underlying improvements in the microprocessor, I believe that there have also been major fundamental improvements in the operating systems that run on both today's and the soon to come next generation microprocessors (sorry, my obligatory Nehalem-EX advertisement... coming soon in 2010). A decision made many years ago to run your solution on Unix/RISC was made based on comparing all the different variables at that time to pick what was right for your business. At that time you likely decided that your solution would not run on these operating systems, these operating systems were not suitable for your mission critical workloads etc. Probably right decision at that point, but like everything else decisions get revisited based upon the here and now and what may have been the right solution in the past (and right decision) may not be the right solution for your needs now.

I wanted to share some thoughts specifically on Redhat Linux today. Lets take a little look at Redhat Enterprise Linux. Current versions of Redhat can deliver what is required for your critical solutions. RHEL is ready and here are some of the reasons cited by Redhat in recent webinars on this topic and my interpretation of their comments

Hosts real-time global mission-critical infrastructures and operations 24 X 7 - its tried and tested by other Enterprises
Enables 5x9s availability in highly secure environments - pretty important to most critical solutions
Contributes measurable reductions to TCO and enables, agile, standardized, and virtualized infrastructures - TCO benefits through standardization
Has major ISVs on-board with the majority of 3rd party Unix applications have Linux and/or Windows versions available - the ISVs that traditionally delivered applications to you based on Unix, also have versions supported on Linux/Windows
Many customer unique applications are developed with programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, or J2EE and can be migrated to Linux and / or Windows - your applications can be moved
Hosts most major database systems standard for your infrastructure - all the major databases run and run well on Linux

One of the other things we encounter a lot is around whether the technical considerations to move from one operating system environment are too high to overcome and outweigh the benefits of moving. There are always technical considerations and things that you need to know to move from one environment to another. However you are not alone in trying to understand these technical considerations. Redhat have done a phenomenal job of documenting the challenges of moving from say Solaris to Linux and have developed a great Strategic Migration Planning Guide. This is available on request. In recent webinars Redhat outline some of the things that you need to consider for the following technical categories

- Development Environment; Kernel tuning; Security; Filesystems; Debugging, tracing, Profiling; Command Differences; Deployment methods; Software Management; Virtualization; Application considerations

In addition to the current versions of Redhat running on Intel architecture, we are also working very closely on future versions that will take advantage of the 20+ new RAS features that are planned for Nehalem-EX - more on that in a future blog

You are not alone, resources, tools and expertize exist to help you make that move and reap the business benefits while still delivering to the requirements of your business. Check out Redhat online tools for more information that dives deeper into all the areas for consideration http://www.redhat.com/migrate/solaris_to_linux/

We think Redhat Linux and Xeon are ready to run your mission critical workloads and solutions...What do you think?

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:33:48 GMT

Ok it may be that your IT department or enterprise applications are limiting your opportunity to adopt 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, but your inability to adopt a 64 bit CAD application can be very limiting to your productivity.

Here as an example from a recent discussion with some end users who are involved in a workstation pilot with Intel. When they moved to a 64 bit version of their favorite CAD application the time to open a 2.5GB file dropped from 20 minutes to less than 1.

Question - How many files does your engineering team open a day? What is the cost of the 20 minutes?

Customers operating in a 32 bit world are forced to work with smaller models. You knew that. And of course smaller file sizes will open faster.

But….

Rather than working with the chassis, engine and transmission in a single view, you will need to work each one independently. The results is you may miss a design interference, a misalignment or another obvious design issue, because you only had a partial view of the entire design. More rework and more delays.

Yes but... many of the enterprise applications you use are 32 bit and you need to have a 32 bit workstation environment in order to access these tools. That may have been true once, but with technology like Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O and Parallels™ Workstation Extreme software you now have the opportunity for an uncompromised workstation experience. You get all the benefits of a 64 bit CAD application and you can still work within a 32 bit environment when you need to. You can even pass the data between workstation environments.

Do not be too slow to adopt a 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, just opening files faster and working with a complete design can make eth cost of a new workstation irrelevant.

To learn more about Intel® Xeon® based workstations visit www.intel.com\go\workstation

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:43:18 GMT

Are you ready to innovate faster or explore more design options in less time than ever before?

The digital workbench powered by two Intel Xeon 5500 processors gives you the opportunity to create, test and modify your idea right at your workstation. Have no doubt, workstations powered by two processors, with eight total cores, sixteen computational threads, and memory capacities up to 192GB are proving extremely capable at analysis-driven design.

Today’s digital workbench is nothing at all like last year’s workstation, which may have struggled to design and simulate. This new breed of a workstation presents you with the capability to rapidly play “what if?”

What is driving the interest in the digital workbench?

Organizations of all shapes and sizes are looking for opportunities to reduce design cycle times and associated costs without negatively impacting product performance. One potential method of achieving this is by enabling designers to consider the validity of a greater number of design concepts earlier in the design cycle. This may not only shorten design cycles, but it may also enable you to ultimately deliver a more favorable product configuration.

The product development rules are changing.

Manufacturers are recognizing that by reordering product design activities, they may be able to achieve a more efficient product development process. By empowering engineers with easy-to-use and powerful 3D conceptual design tools, together with early access to CAE applications, engineers may be able develop the most advantageous designs before committing them to labor-intensive detailed design processes.

Isn’t this old news?

Many manufacturers agree the greatest opportunity to impact product development cost is by bringing simulation forward. That is old news. Manufacturers know that when product analysis or simulation results trail the detailed design process then product changes become extremely expensive and negatively impact new product release schedules. Worse yet, they also realize that changes made downstream in a design cycle are “last minute” and almost always imply compromises on original design goals. This, of course, cuts into the product performance and profits of the new or updated product.

Using simulation and getting results before the detailed design process begins helps ensure that the CAD models meet performance requirements, mitigating last-minute and expensive design changes.

OK, the product development rules may be changing, but I still need an expert.

No doubt, the expert is still needed. However, advancements at companies like ALTAIR, ANSYS, SIMULIA, MSC, SpaceClaim and others are all making it easier to bring simulation and analysis further upstream in the design process.

As one example, let’s look at the ANSYS Workbench platform. This solution provides an easy-to-use framework that guides the user through even complex multi-physics analyses with drag-and-drop simplicity. It supports bi-directional CAD connectivity and enables the idea of simulation-driven product development.

ANSYS is an example of what ISVs are doing to create tools that learn from the experts and export them to others who need access to their knowledge. Yes, the expert is still very much needed, but leveraging the expert’s knowledge and driving it upstream in the design process is needed even more.

The new model

Using the combined hardware and software technologies delivered through a digital workbench, engineers can now create a single digital model that gives them the ability to design, visualize and simulate their products faster than ever.

This hardware and software suite enables users to create a digital prototype and can help engineers to reduce their reliance on costly physical prototypes and get more innovative designs to market faster.

The digital workbench helps users bring together design data from all phases of the product development process into a single digital model that can be rapidly changed, tested and validated.

What can you do to test the promise of the digital workbench?

Today’s workstation can provide you with a magnificent digital canvas to create tomorrow today. You need to decide if you want to explore reordering your product design activities and potentially achieve a more efficient product development process.

Today’s workstation gives engineers a new tool that can be likened to a digital workbench. This tool, powered by two Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, hosts a suite of software applications that engineers can employ to create and test their ideas. The pliers, hammer and nails found on a workbench in a garage or basement have now been replaced with digital tools that promise to accelerate innovations via a process known as digital prototyping. Its enablers include application tools like detailed CAD, CAE and PIM. Together they represent the new digital workbench—a powerful innovation tool you can use to bring your ideas forward faster than ever before.

Are you ready to use a digital workbench?

Visit www.intel.com/go/workstation to see which workstation is right for you.

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:38:51 GMT

Interactive Modeling and Simulation – Come on you are kidding!!

Recent advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series have brought the field of computer simulation to the threshold of a new era. While not quite interactive, simulation and analysis can now occur at a pace that impacts decisions further upstream in the design process.

Simulation and analysis tools are also no longer the domain of the expert. Organizations can now potentially achieve a more efficient product development process by considering a reordering of product design activities and empowering engineers with easy-to-use and powerful 3D conceptual design tools and early access to CAE applications.

Why consider reordering your product development process?

This is not new news. Manufacturers know that when product analysis or simulation results trail the detailed design process that product changes are become significantly expensive and will most likely negatively impact new product release schedules. Worse yet, they also realize that changes made downstream in any design cycle are often “last minute” and almost always imply compromises on original design goals. This, of course, cuts into the product performance and profits of the new or updated product.

By reordering product design activities, manufactures may be able to achieve a more efficient product development process and reduce overall product development cost, time and risk.

No experts needed.

Don’t be fooled. While ISV’s from ANSYS, ALTAIR, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM, SIMLUIA, SolidWorks and others have made tremendous strides in making their simulation products easier to use, you probably still need an expert. However, their collective advancements in tools, wrappers, and easy-to-use frameworks that guide the engineers through complex multi-physics analyses with drag-and-drop simplicity make it easier to move analysis further upstream.

That means your expert can now focus on the really hard problems.

Workgroup Computing – Bringing “Real” HPC Computing To Your Department

Using analysis and simulation to get results before the detailed design process begins will help ensure the CAD models meet performance requirements and will almost always mitigate last-minute and expensive design changes.

Large scale compute intensive jobs used to require investments and/or access to a divisionally shared, large scale cluster housed in a controlled Data Center environment …supporting hundreds of users.

While this may have been true a few years ago, the advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series now makes it possible to quickly and efficiently solve large scale problems closer to the engineers responsible for dealing with them, on compute clusters supporting small workgroups or departments of engineers vs. large scale clusters shared by hundreds of engineers.

As an example let’s look at the Cray CX1™ deskside personal supercomputer. Like others in this new usage category, it presents an organization with a solution that is the "right size" in performance, functionality, and cost for individuals and departmental workgroups who want to harness HPC without the complexity of traditional clusters. Equipped with powerful Intel Xeon 5500 series processors the Cray CX1 delivers the power of a high performance cluster with the ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation.

OK, You Can Give Me The Performance, But The Support Can Be A Nightmare

Intel® Cluster Ready makes HPC simpler. It boosts productivity and solves new problems. The Intel® Cluster Ready program makes it simpler to experience the power of high-performance computing.

Intel Cluster Ready presents HPC users a certification program that is designed to establish a common specification among original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and others for designing, programming and deploying high performance clusters built with Intel components.

For users, this certification means that these certified HPC systems will run a wide range of Intel Cluster Ready ISV applications right of the box. Tested, validated and simple.

By selecting a certified Intel Cluster Ready system for your registered Intel Cluster Ready applications you can be confident that hardware and software components will work together, right out of the box. Software tools such as Intel® Cluster Checker help ensure that those components continue to work together, delivering a high level of quality and a low total cost of ownership over the course of the cluster’s lifetime.

To learn more about Intel HPC Technology visit www.intel.com/go/HPC

ennis.p.skillern@intel.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:10:06 GMT

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0? Because it makes simple, practical, business sense that is all. SAP has identified several key reasons why customers are concerned about migration and several among them are as follows:

· Cost, Cost, Cost

o HW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration

· Business Justification

o Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?

· Additional risk of business disruption

o Migration of ERP environment is complex enough…how much more risk is there when upgrading your hardware?

From a cost perspective, the perception that hardware is a barrier to migration can be easily overcome. Based on research, the hardware cost as a percentage of the overall migration cost is only about 7%. That means 93% of the cost is in licensing, consulting, etc, etc. HW costs are only the “tip of the iceberg” and the real $ investment lies elsewhere in the equation.

Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade your hardware? Well…frankly, it does not make sense not to do it. One, we showed above that the hardware investment is minimal compared to SW licensing, consulting, service, etc. Two, the hardware requirements of ERP 6.0 are significantly higher than previous versions. ERP 6.0 requires up to 2.5x more CPU performance, 2.5x more memory and 1.5x more I/O! You will need the increased performance and scalability that Intel provides in our microprocessors. While the ERP performance requirements have increased 2.5x, Intel performance with SAP has increased 10X! Oh, btw…energy efficiency does matter and in your new ERP environment you will be able to consolidate servers and save on power and cooling costs. TCO will be significantly reduced and from hardware investment standpoint, you are likely going to recover the cost of the servers in a very reasonable timeframe.

From my discussions with the IT community, their major concern and number one focus area is to prevent business disruption and downtime. This costs companies real and significant money. The fact is that an ERP migration is a complex enough project managing the strategic, functional and technical portions. Adding a server infrastructure change increases fundamental risk. But, the key here is that it is done often and done successfully. Intel IT has published several whitepapers on the subject and communicated “Best Known Methods” to minimize that risk. A quick summary is inserted here:

Challenge:

• Convert Intel’s Worldwide Warehouse Management Software

• Upgrade from SAP* ERP version 4.7 to 6.0, change the DBMS, and perform a Unicode* conversion as well as a hardware upgrade

• Minimize downtime

Benefit to Intel IT:

• SAP ERP 6.0 improves Intel supportability

• Increases ease of integration to SAP NetWeaver* 7.1 Suite

• Provides access to Enhancement Packs and Enterprise Services

• Intel^® Itanium^®-based servers provide access to 128 GB of memory for database and SAP operations and significantly increased performance from true 64-bit processing

Key Results:

• Reduced downtime of upgrade by 50% by using Intel Architecture

In summary, upgrading your server infrastructure when migrating your ERP environment is a very, very complex task, but form a business perspective, it should be fairly easy to see the true benefits from combining the ERP migration and hardware upgrade at the same time.

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:07:25 GMT

The digital workbench is like the workbench at home where you have pliers, nails and hammers that we use to build or fix things—the workbench holds all the best, most useful tools to complete a project and makes them available at your fingertips.

The digital workbench replaces analog tools with digital tools and software suites from ISVs (e.g. Altair, ANSYS, Autodesk, Dassault CATIA, Dassault SIMULIA, ESI, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM and others). These ISV’s are all laser focused on enabling designers to move analysis further up the design chain. Couple this with recent performance gains available on workstations based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series from suppliers like Boxx, Dell, HP and Lenovo and you have the opportunity to now view your workstations as a digital workbench. The result is a new environment that enables users to rapidly test and refine their ideas potentially at the speed of thought.

The digital workbench, powered by two intelligent Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, can help you transform complex and visually intensive data into actionable information at near-supercomputer speeds.

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:52:04 GMT

“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.

The digital workbench, powered by two Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors, can have an enormous impact on your organization’s ability to design, visualize and simulate products, from the conceptual design phase through the entire manufacturing process, and it is all done virtually before a prototype is ever invested in. These digital workbenches exceed the computational power of the Cray C90 series, which in the 1990s was revered as the fastest ever.

Without question we all recognize that simulation and modeling have become indispensable tools in design. But visualization remains the principal conduit to transforming data into knowledge and actionable information. The digital workbench can provide you with both the compute capacity and the visualization capability you need to innovate faster.

If all you are doing is CAD on your workstation, then an entry workstation may be best your solution. However, as others around you adopt modern workflows that incorporate simulation-based engineering and digital prototyping, you may want to step up to a more comprehensive digital workbench solution that provides an entire suite of tools to help you play more “what ifs” locally and faster than ever before.

One more point on this: If you are stuck on the entry workstation, then you may want to consider a mobile workstation. While the immediate cost will be higher than an entry-level workstation, the real cost may be lower. With mobile workstations you can design with your customers and not just for your customers. You may be able to reduce the number of design reviews by innovating with your customer right there as spontaneous ideas happen. The real cost of a tethered entry-level workstation may be indeed be much higher than you think.

Join the revolution and innovate faster with the digital workbench powered by two Intel(r) Xeon(r) 5500 processors

greg.wagnon@intel.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:38:33 GMT

Congratulations to Ron as the winner of the Intel Xeon Workstation Sweepstakes. He has been a member of The Server Room for over a year and was able to complete the quiz on the first attempt.

Good job!

"I was excited to hear that I won the Intel Xeon workstation sweepstakes. With its incredible performance, the system offers me the flexibility to use it in so many ways that I'm not sure how to best utilize it at the moment. It's a welcome problem to have and I look forward exploring the possibilities. Thanks to Intel and the Server Room team for providing a great resource to everyone!"

Thank you all for entering and look for more sweepstakes offerings in the near future.

- Your 'The Server Room' Admin's

jimmy.leon@intel.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:55:11 GMT

Are your “stuck at the desktop?” A May 2008 study from the Council on Competitiveness and IDC identifies the barriers large and small firms face in moving from desktop computers to High Performance Computing (HPC) servers.

Among the study findings¹, most firms:

- Reveal that they have important problems they cannot solve on their desktop systems

- Face three major barriers to adoption: lack of application software, lack of sufficient talent, and cost constraints

As a scientist, an engineer, or an analyst: Have you outgrown your desktop? What kind of new innovation or capabilities would the use of a HPC cluster give you? Imagine the capability to analyze data and gain more insight faster, or the ability to virtually prototype your ideas product more efficiently and cost effectively, or perhaps analyze, model, or simulate larger problems.

Few OEM products aimed at the personal or “desk-side” segment are making easier for end users to adopt HPC and help to overcome some of the barriers to adoption: the Cray* CX1*, SGI* Octane* III, and HP’s CP Workgroup System. These products are aimed at addressing the needs of the entry level HPC market and the workstation users that have outgrown their desktops. Both the Cray CX1 and SGI Octane III systems are Intel® Cluster Ready (ICR) program certified which means that Intel has worked with the hardware, system, and application vendors to ensure your configuration has been pre-tested for interoperability, so you can deploy with confidence. ICR helps to reduce TCO by making sure the components keep working together over the cluster’s lifetime, to increase availability and save time for IT departments.

So if your IT department cannot buy you full blown super computer, ask them for a personal super computer.

¹ Source: Reveal. Council on Competitiveness and USC-ISI Broad Study of Desktop Technical Computing End Users and HPC, May 2008 (http://www.compete.org/publications/detail/420/reveal/)

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:59:40 GMT

“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!

“Any color—so long as it's black.” Henry Ford

Like the automobile, the workstation has morphed into something much more than what it once was. It now has more capabilities and features than its predecessor and, if you allow it to, it can help you accelerate the pace of your innovation.

Today’s workstation gives engineers a new tool that can be likened to a digital workbench. This tool is powered by two Intel Xeon 5500 series processors with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology and Intel® Hyper Threading Technology to take advantage of the processor’s power and thermal headroom to enable increased performance of both multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads.

Today's workstation can host a suite of software applications from ISV's like Autodesk, SolidWorks, PTC, Bentley and others to create and test their ideas. The pliers, hammer and nails found on a workbench in a garage or basement have now been replaced with digital tools that promise to accelerate innovations via a process known as digital prototyping. Its enablers include application tools like detailed CAD, CAE and PIM. Together they represent the new digital workbench—a powerful innovation tool you can use to bring your ideas forward faster than ever before.

“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? You may be thinking like Wilbur Wright.

Innovation in the workplace is paced by how well you can use technology to test and improve your ideas. As you begin to adopt modern workflows you may realize the dramatic impact that simulation-based engineering or digital prototyping can have on your product development cost and schedules. You will soon 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 …?

Are you ready to adopt modern workflows and accelerate your innovation?

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:35:13 GMT

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

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:12:59 GMT

If you have been around the workstation community for a while you may be used to seeing numbers like 4, 8 12 64GB. Those are the old numbers – sorry.

When the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series debuted it introduced systems with up to3 memory channels as opposed to just two. So how much memory do you need now? Well to get peak performance from your workstation you need to think in multiples of 3 and not 2. That means not 4GB and certainly not 3 GB. Numbers that work best are identified in the table below.

Ok that is a lot of choices. Which one is most likely to deliver the best workstation experience when you have three memory channels and why?

As before in the two channel days, the best experience will be arrived at when you evenly populate dimm slots. That answer will vary on whether or not you have a single processor workstation or a dual processor digital workbench.

If you have a single processor entry level workstation you will want to configure your systems with 6, 12 or 18GB if you are using 2GB memory sticks. If you are using 4GB sticks you want to think of 12, 24 and 36GB. And if you are really thinking rich memory configurations you will want to focus on 24, 48 and 72GB configurations. This assumes you have up to nine dim slots.

If you are using dual processor digital workbench and you are mega-tasking through a number of complex task you may want to consider the following sweet spots.

With 2GB memory sticks you will need to think of 12, 24, 36Gb. With 4GB memory sticks you should think of 24, 48 and 72GB and with 8GB memory sticks you should be thinking of 48, 96 and 144GB. Again the goal is to keep the memory channels with the same memory sizes and speeds to see the best performance. When you do that you are most likely going to see the best performance.

If you are wondering which kind of workstation is best for the work you do, you want to visit the Intel workstation technology page and use the workstation selection tool. It can be found at www.intel.com/products/workstation/processors

william.h.lea@intel.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:49:41 GMT

Hi All,

You found the Intel XEON Workstation Sweepstakes!

Click HERE to start the quiz and submit your entry today !

Good Luck to all.

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:17:32 GMT

I wrote a while back about how the Xeon 7400(Dunnington) processor series compared to RISC. Since then I have shared information through other blog posts and sharing content about how Xeon 7400 and Xeon 5500 will compare to both SPARC and POWER.

Xeon 7400 and Xeon 5500 are the current products shipping into the marketplace today. I.M.H.O they offer a pretty compelling alternative from both a performance and TCO perspective Vs SPARC and POWER. But I will not try and repeat all the reasons here

What I wanted to share with you was some thoughts about what the next product to succeed Xeon 7400 will bring to the RISC party. Nehalem-EX is the code-name for our next generation of product designed to serve workloads currently serviced by Xeon 7400 today (i.e. Database, ERP, BI etc). EX btw is what we all would traditionally call MP or multi processor servers

Don't stop reading now, here is why I'm EXCITED about what Nehalem-EX will bring to the RISC party.

My excitement is actually based on real customer discussions about what Nehalem-EX will do for them and why it delivers some new stuff (my code for features and benefits) which they see as a pre-requisite to make the move from RISC to Xeon. For some customers the TCO and performance of products have been enough to convince them to move. For some other customers there are still some checkboxes remaining which I believe Nehalem-EX will address

Here is a snapshot of some of the cool new stuff which is actually convincing customers (from some real deals that I have worked)

Improved bandwidth. Up to 9 times memory bandwidth of previous generations
Introduction of Quickpath Interconnects to the EX systems
Add new RAS features previously seen on Itanium products to Xeon products
Significant improvement in performance vs previous generations e.g. Database 2.5xe
More scalable platforms through 8 OEMs offering >8S. These platforms are key to manage large databases and for large scale consolidation
Mainframe class availability in scalable platforms

For more information check out the press briefing from May. See more the details in the presentation

Nehalem-EX goes into production later this year and I am pretty excited about how it will change the game. What do you think?

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wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:58:14 GMT

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

[RC1]To distinguish from the hardware appliance breed