A Revolution in Product Design

CAD engineers to benefi t from innovations in processors and so ware. BY PETER VARHOL

Engineers engaged in computer-aided design (CAD) can be excused for thinking that workstation performance hasn’t adequately kept up with their needs. Because CAD computations don’t easily lend themselves to parallel computations, the trend over the last decade toward multiple processors and multiple cores per processor doesn’t provide a significant boost to executing CAD applications. There is a strong connection between the clock speed of the processor and the performance of CAD software. However, the design and manufacturing technologies that enabled rapid increases in clock speed during the 1990s began reaching their theoretical limits, and Intel has turned to processor performance improvements using alternative technologies. But users of CAD software from the likes of Autodesk, Siemens PLM, SolidWorks, PTC, and Bentley still have a few secret weapons in the performance race. Intel has provided some innovative processor technologies that can speed up serial applications such as CAD, and a few software partners have taken advantage of these technologies to deliver real solutions to CAD engineers. Autodesk Inventor product suite offers a set of software for 3D mechanical design, product simulation, tooling creation, and design communication. Inventor, as well as SolidWorks, PTC and Siemens PLM all offer integrated tool suites that are intended to help engineers validate their ideas earlier in the design process. Hardware Provides the Performance Foundation While processor clock speed increases have given way to multiple cores, Intel has built a few tricks into its current high-performance processors such as the Intel® Xeon® processor family. One example is Turbo Boost, which provides the ability to dynamically increase the processor performance for periods of time in response to a high demand for performance. Turbo Boost activates when the operating system requests the highest performance state of the processor, delivering a substantially higher clock speed for a serial application than the rated speed of the processor. Another innovation is hyperthreading. A hyperthreaded core has multiple parts of the pipeline—typically control registers or general-purpose registers, allowing the operating system to schedule two threads or processes simultaneously. The result is the processor can hold multiple thread states at once. Hyperthreading makes the context switches that processors normally engage in occur much faster. Intel has also focused on better hardware support for virtualization. Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O enables users to create virtual partitions and concurrently run interactive and batch applications with assured levels of performance. It includes several important capabilities, such as I/O device assignment, DMA remapping, interrupt remapping, and reliability features that prevent memory or virtual machine (VM) corruption. Software Delivers Virtualization Flexibility Software providers Microsoft and Parallels have taken advantage of Intel hardware virtualization technologies to bring better performance using virtual machines. Microsoft Windows HPC Server R2 provides engineering groups with access to affordable and powerful supercomputing resources in the familiar Windows environment. Effectively, it enables clusters of workstations to act as a single HPC cluster, enabling all engineers to share computing resources. Parallels PWE delivers the a highperformance virtualization platform for workstations that gives end users dedicated HPC, graphic and networking resources for both host and guest workstation environments. You may not be able to take good advantage of multiple processor cores to accelerate parallel execution, but today’s workstations and software provide ways to improve engineering processes. Using virtualization,you can test out multiple designs on separate VMs, with each performing at close to the full speed of the CPU. With Microsoft’s HPC Server, you can do so at cluster speeds, without taking a backseat to analysis and simulation jobs. While processor innovations continue to occur, the notion of faster processor clock speeds in the foreseeable future is unlikely. However, companies can rethink the engineering process and leverage the software advancements being made by CAD vendors. These companies are exploring the value of simulation-based design and how these solutions allow companies to employ all the available technology to increase innovation. The question as we start 2011 for the rest of us is—are we going to see how we can change the way we work in order to make the best use of new innovations?