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From CAD User Mechanical Magazine  Vol 22 No 2 - FEBRUARY/MARCH 2009

The beauty of CAD2’s workstation lies in there performance and efficiency - but they pack a beastly amount of processing power too, as David Chadwick discovered!

Do you know how to configure your computer to run your CAD software? Would you even know where to start? When you buy a new workstation, do you just go for the most powerful you can afford, thinking that by providing maximum horsepower you are going to bludgeon your way through your favourite application at speed? Or do you stop to consider that different CAD applications work in different ways, and where one requires high speed access to the graphics card, another is a bit heavy on the CPU? If you choose to buy your workstation from one of the main manufacturers, the problem does not arise, as you are given the choice of half a dozen configurations according to your budget, and your superficial needs.

You may even be able to optimise your new computer's performance using software tools, but that depends upon you having a fairly advanced level of knowledge about system design and operation. The alternative solution is to have a workstation or laptop put together according to the CAD and other software that you intend to run on it - for pretty much the same price as a mainstream machine. If Inventor is the design tool of choice, your personalised machine would be configured differently than if you intended to use SolidWorks as your main CAD application. Bearing in mind the different combinations that you could get from a variety of CAD packages, and an equivalent range of CGI software tools, as the computers are widely used in the gaming and graphic content markets, the possible combinations of models available run into many thousands of models. Actually, Mike Leach, who leads the team at CAD2, says that with their 12 different product ranges, they could come up with 1.2 million different configurations. Wonder how they had the time to work that out! CAD2 You can't, of course, put such devices together on a production line.

They are all hand built by engineers with a wealth of experience in the different market places, who know just what makes Pro/ENGINEER, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Inventor, UGS, etc., tick, and what set up suits each individual or combination of packages. CAD2 is wholly owned by AceCAD, developers of the popular StruCAD suite of structural engineering applications for the construction industry. Their base in Derby is a pretty remarkable place. Or should I say, there are some pretty remarkable things going on inside their offices. Putting together their custom CAD workstations and laptops is just one aspect of their work. They have also put together some stupendously powerful workstations - well above the requirements of all but a very small section of the CAD industry, of which more later - and they do an awful lot of backroom work for their construction clients worldwide, filling in the gaps where local expertise is perhaps not up to scratch!

CAD2 started out by putting together advanced specification workstations for the games industry - where, as you would expect, high level graphics performance is a sine qua non. Currently they are putting workstations together with combinations of CPUs and multi-core processors, and are clocking machines up to 4GHz! New customers are asked specifically what combination of applications they want to run on their computers. If Inventor is the software of choice, to take just one example, the system will be designed around the bottleneck in the CPU.

This particular issue means that replacing an entry level graphics card with a top of the range £2K card will make very little difference to the workstations, performance. The CAD2 workstation would be designed to get round the bottleneck. Software with specific imaging needs - like SolidWorks Photoworks, Lightworks, etc., suffers from bottlenecks in other areas. Most CAD software is still single- threaded, but CAD2 will also put systems together for multi-core applications like COSMOS. To prepare for this, customers are even asked to send in sample datasets, so that the various rendering systems can be evaluated on the machines. Mike said that they could even put 8 separate CAD applications on an 8 core machine, and configure the system to run each at the level of performance you would expect from a single core workstation.

It's not just about knowing the applications either, according to Mike. His engineers need to know what is happening in the workstations at so many different levels so that they can integrate the correct components in the correct order. If they make a mistake early on, that can grow as the machine develops. If low latency memory modules are used - to keep costs down, capable of only just running the motherboard, they will create unstable platforms when the 8Gb of memory on the board is used intensively. As a result of this attention to detail, Mike

says that they are the world's only independent workstation manufacturer approved by SolidWorks, and their products are used satisfactorily by some major aerospace companies, such as BAE and Rolls Royce.

To give one specific example, Mike spoke of a manufacturer that has to handle very large models, and that CAD2 is the only manufacturer that can handle their requirements - and such is their workstation demand that CAD2 upgrades their systems every 3 months!

CUSTOM BUILT COMPONENTS

Back in the '80s, the old Cray supercomputer used custom cable lengths to optimise performance. The same principle applies here: replacing poor quality mass produced cables with cables rated at 6Gb per second capacity. The standard fans have been thrown away and replaced with larger and slower dust-free fans, with 50,000 hour duty cycles - and not the standard 10,000 hours.

The heat sinks used have been specifically made for CAD2, as have the water cooled systems that they use in some models. The interior of the workstations are designed for maximum airflow, and acoustic upgrades make them practically silent. Every system that they build will also come back to CAD2, where 85% of the 100% lead-free components will be recycled.

AND THE COST?

And this point in proceedings you will doubtless be thinking “yes, and what does that add to the price?” Well the good news is that a typical CAD workstation will cost around £700 to £2,000. For those aiming at photorealistic renderings, CAD2 will put you a machine together for £3K. They can go up to £10,000 and even beyond if required, and there is a range of mobile workstations available for between £1,300 and £2,000!

NOW FOR THE BEAST!

How does 4 teraflops grab you? That is 4

followed by 12 zeroes, floating point operations a second. A million times faster than 4 megaflops, which the aforementioned Cray was able to crank out. Actually, with rounding down and various other routines that need to be performed to maintain that, the actual speed of the PSC is just 3.2 teraflops which you could probably achieve with just 41 dual quad core servers working at 120 gigaflops each! The problem is that each would consume 600 watts of energy

-i.e. 24kilowatts - compared to the 838 watts of the PSC! How do they achieve that sort of performance in one workstation? Bearing in mind the fact that top of the range graphics cards are where the performance is now at in such machines, the PSC comes with 3 x 4Gb TESLA cards, enabling the processor to rely on the colossal power of parallel processing in the GPUs for its performance.

TESLA are NVIDIA’s massively powerful GPU computing systems, way above the performance levels of their Quadra FX cards which, in themselves, are no mean machines. CAD2 are the first to be able to hook three of these TESLA cards together in one machine - using, of course, the expertise and minute attention to detail they display in their workstations.

To illustrate just how powerful these machines are, I was shown an amazing demonstration using software from Oxford University to simulate the 'Big Bang' in real time, manipulating the rotation in 3D. The developers were equally astounded, having only been able to run it at a frame every couple of seconds with all of the computer power they originally had available.

FULL SUPPORT

Users demanding such colossal power think high end analysis for the PSC - have to put themselves very much into the hands of the computer supplier. CAD2, therefore, have ramped up their sales, after sales and technical support services to meet the most pernickety of customers, installing and optimising software for each machine, direct access to the engineers putting their machines together, and interactive web support.

My only concern is that when the secret of their success gets out, an increased demand for their services might dilute their specific capabilities. I was gratified to see, therefore, following my earlier visit to their Derby office, that both AceCad and CAD2, in the face of the current recession, were in expansion mode.

www.cad2.com

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