Intel Community: The Server Room Blog

As I mentioned in my previous blog, extreme performance and extreme visualization found in today's Intel based workstations can combine to help change the way users work and can help play a significant role in a users successful use of simultaneous workflows to innovate faster.

Getting to simultaneous workflows is not easy, but the rewards can potentially be spectacular. The hard work in developing these new workflows can also be rewarding to both:

workers , as the think out side the box on how these new simultaneous flows can reduce development time
corporations as they potentially reduce product development time as they accelerate the move from concept, to initial design, through revision and interaction through dissemination.

Let's look at the manufacturing vertical where you hear words like design optimization, digital prototyping, or analysis driven design.

With workstation supercomputers, workers can effectively design, mesh and simulate on one platform. In fact recent test with ISV's confirm users can solve large scale problems (e.g. 5 million degree of freedom finite element models) and still maintain a rigorous interactive workload. That's right, no more dreaded hour glass, or more importantly no disengaging in creative thought as you wait and you wait. Unfortunately, that also means fewer coffee breaks.

Simultaneous workflows are not a far fetched idea. In fact today users can initiate design optimization before an FEA model is even generated. Users today can simply select which dimensions in a CAD model may need to be optimized, apply the design criterion, which may include maximum stresses, temperatures or frequencies. The analysis process appropriate for the design criteria is then performed. The results of the analysis are compared with the design criterion, and, if necessary without any human intervention, the CAD geometry is updated. Now that is cool.

Not new, but very cool and with workstation supercomputers based Intel® Xeon® processors power users can employ up to 8 computational engines and over 100 GFLOPS(1) of 64 bit computing performance in an attempt to out innovate their competition. These new workstations actually resemble yesterday's high performance supercomputers - with some very visual difference -

they are smaller and
have the ability to process and visualize large scale problems that not long ago demanded access to a share of high performance computer.

Today users can have supercomputer performance under their desk and if they choose to change the way they work, they can employ the available compute and visualization resources to generate new ideas, or simply refine existing products faster than ever before.

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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 or
create 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.