In industries such as aerospace, automotive, and heavy industry, companies rely tremendously on their engineering and design teams throughout the year to develop and deliver the innovations that create more value for their customers and more revenue and profit for the company.
Returning that goodwill, what would your engineers and designers like in their stocking this holiday season?
I recommend the gift that keeps on giving throughout the year… the gift of speed. Updated technology enables your applications to run faster, and therefore your talented, highly skilled team spends less time waiting and more time designing.
Pilatus is a world leader in the design and manufacture of single-engine turboprops, and it makes it a priority to ensure that its engineers are equipped with the latest technology and tools, supporting every phase of aircraft research and development. Pilatus uses
Siemens Teamcenter product lifecycle management (PLM) software to provide the tools for each stage of development. It has learned that the amount of RAM, along with Intel® Xeon® processor technology that can provide real-time results, are crucial when manipulating large parts and assemblies that would otherwise delay highly paid designers. To support Siemens Teamcenter PLM software, Pilatus needs 12 Gbytes of storage per workstation, along with 64-bit operating systems.
With customers like Pilatus in mind, we recently did some tests of our entry-level workstation versus our standard desktop models to see the difference in speed. We found Dell Precision workstations that leveraged large amounts of RAM and Intel® Xeon® processors were able to complete tasks up to 972 percent faster than our standard desktops. The benchmark used SPECviewperf® 11, which mimics real-world scenarios of a user running workstation class applications.
The engineers and designers at Pilatus will come back from a holiday break ready to meet the new technical challenges set before them, backed by modern technology. Share your holiday gift-giving ideas to help brighten the season for other development teams.
Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the US and/or other countries.
Great post. More than ever engineers and engineering teams are required to work faster and smarter. Problem is sometimes, they are asked to do so with basically the same hardware and software used two, three and even five years previously. I retired from a Fortune 500 company with 32 engineers in our design department. Upgrades were tough to come by due to expense. Even added RAM was a god-send. Flat screens--forget about it. I always wondered why sales and marketing got the good "stuff" while we were relegated to the "five-year" plan. One impediment was "off-shoring". All of our CAD work was accomplished in India. I certainly hope the trend is to bring back the CAD effort and let a dedicated engineering team do ALL of the work. Maybe then there will be equipment upgrades.
No doubt it's great to have fast workstations. However, it's not unusual to have computer systems networked and sometimes the network administrators are more concerned about email uptime than they are about fast and secure downloads of large design files. The network has to support the design objectives of the organization as well - not just the hardware on the desktop.
Yes, it seems that the IT guys are sometimes a little blind to the special needs of Engineering. Many don't understand how graphic intensive our applications are. Some IT folks believe that high performance graphics is just for games, so there's no need for Engineering to have better graphic performance than what is required to run a spreadsheet.
I also ran into trouble with software updates. Unfortunately, so many Engineering applications require patches and updates, and with IT security as tight as it is, all that updating is hard for IT to tolerate.
Technology can go a long way toward helping people at all levels in manufacturing, and this list of technologies and solutions can help the manufacturing industry.
The next time you're churning through simulation models, manipulating 3D designs in real-time, or rendering a beautiful photo-realistic image, take a moment to think about all the work that goes on behind the scenes and be glad you don't have to worry about it.
Workstations are high-performance computers that are used for the most intensive computing tasks, such as creative design and engineering, computer modeling and analysis, and animation.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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