The Graphics, Design and Imaging Challenge

The personal graphics workstation is entering a new era for power, performance and capability. The combined power of Intel's new Nehalem architecture and Terascale (one Teraflop or more) performance of the underlying graphics subsystem (GPU) make real time graphical modelling, animation, rendering and effects more achievable than ever before.

For architects, designers, artists and engineers being able to work on tasks up to 25 times or more faster than before, or, even in real time has huge productivity and efficiency benefits.  It also contributes to a higher quality of work releasing creative skills to spend more time with innovation and imagination and less time getting the tools to do the work.  For clients and customers it offers the opportunity to present output in completely different ways offering a richer and more 'real' vision of the designers intent.  It provides more flexibility in engineering environments to spend time creating an aesthetically pleasing form as well as functional utility.

Animating rich 3D designs provides the opportunity to fly through and see an object or structure from all angles and experience it in a virtual reality.  Even offering opportunities to see things that would otherwise be impossible to see.

Enhanced productivity leads to better quality output, reduced development cycle times and faster time to market.  The interval between the idea and the reality is extremely significant to business success.  As much of this that can be done in the virtual world hugely accelerates the process, reducing costs and the risk of an opportunity lost.

How much more power?

The Intel Nehalem chipset and processors provide up to 24 concurrent threads of execution (12 cores and HyperThreading) and over 100GB of available main memory.  While nVidia's GX200 GPU architecture adds to this as much as 1000+ mid-speed GPU cores and 4GB of frame buffer memory per card, with full display port, DVI-I and full colour depth support.

Tasks that would previously have required enormous datasets to be swapped in and out of memory regions, or main and virtual memory can now all be executed within high triple channel speed memory.  To compliment that Nehalem's memory bandwidth is unprecedented with our Cryo Boost taking it to over 2GHz clock speeds and Quick Path Interconnect speeds (effectively the memory bus) approaching or over 7GT/s or 3.5GHz. It really is a desktop supercomputer at your finger tips by any definition.

The workstation storage subsystem has also evolved.  Now Enterprise class resilience and performance are available at the desktop.  All Cryo PC's an Workstations support SATA2 and can also support SAS based disk access for 400MB/s sustained data transfer rates.  Both Interface adapters support all major RAID types including 0, 1, 5 and 10.  So it is possible to enjoy high reliability and availability as well as best in class performance for those projects with mission critical data access requirements.  Solid State drive snow also offer the opportunity to reduce average disk seek times below 0.1ms, this outperforms any conventional mechanical disk array even an Enterprise class fibre channel attached SAN costing typically 100 times more.

Low cost of entry

In line with Moore's law, we are able to make more power available at a lower cost than ever before.  Previously the budgets of blue chips and mega studios would have been stretched by this much CGI compute power but now we can make it accessible to garage producers and cottage industries.  It's also possible to start with a modest budget using standard PC components and build on your technology platform without replacing it for an entirely new proprietary platform.  We offer an Upgrade Assurance policy as standard with all PC's that allows you to trade in for new CPU's, Motherboard chipsets or Graphics cards as they become obsolete or new more powerful ones become available.  There is absolutely no need to throw away your existing technology investment and replace it wholesale.

Whether you're a 3D creative artist, an architect or technical design engineer a Cryo Nehalem workstation or desktop PC could bring significant advantages to your work.

Case Study - OptiTex and Clothing Design

Could virtual fashion shows be the wave of the future? It’s uncertain, but OptiTex Ltd., of Petach Tikva, Israel, has taken the design industry to an entirely new level with its 3D CAD/CAM design technology.

Traditionally, designers had to physically create cloth samples of the actual clothing line for prototyping and to show potential investors, an extremely time consuming and expensive process, which generated a lot of waste. OptiTex 3D modernizes this process by enabling designers to simulate the look and movement of clothing designs on virtual models, allowing them to review, refine and measure samples before the first piece of fabric is ever cut.

To address this design challenge, OptiTex is using the NVIDIA® CUDA™ software development environment to reconstruct its cloth simulation engine’s data and algorithms to run on GPUs. The GPU computing solution has enabled developers to remove bottlenecks in the CPU environment and deliver up to a 10X performance increase. The product development time for a seasonal collection is typically 190 days, but with the reconstructed OptiTex 3D solutions, the time to market is reduced to as little as 35 days.

“Converting OptiTex 3D to utilize GPUs has greatly improved the efficiency of our product, offering further huge benefits to our customers,” says Ran Machtinger, President and CEO of OptiTex, Ltd. “With real-time capabilities, the pattern-making process will change forever. The customers in the textile industry won’t have to rely as much on user experience and exhaustive testing for the finished pattern, as the garment will be continuously visualized in 3D.”

As a result of the real-time performance delivered by the GPU computing solution, designers are able to reduce production costs and shorten design cycle time. Users in a variety of industries including apparel, automotive and aeronautics save on materials, electricity and manufacturing expenses by virtually eliminating wasted fabric, paper, power usage, person hours, and courier fees.