CAD User Online Article Archive

Review

Beauty and the beast

From CAD User AEC Magazine Vol 22 No 3 - FEBRUARY/MARCH 2009

The beauty of CAD2’s workstations lies in their 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 found 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

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