ENGINEERING COMPUTING|||Workstations
32 DE| Technology for Optimal Engineering Design August 2019 /// DigitalEngineering247.com
is awaiting formal NVIDIA certification. “We’ve been doing
scientific computers for 20 years, just called different things,”
notes CEO and founder Randall Copeland.
The biggest change with the NVIDIA Data Science specifi-
cation is not as much about the GPU as the software stack, Co-
peland says. “A computer designed to run better for Revit or 3ds
Max is not the same as the computer that runs CUDA best.”
Copeland says NVIDIA has done a “great job developing a
market for artificial intelligence and deep learning.” They rec-
ognized their CUDA architecture was well-suited for massive
data sets, and “they help people who are good in something
else who have to become AI experts.”A Personal Data Sandbox
The phrase “data scientist” was first coined by a Google ex-
ecutive in 2010, says NVIDIA’s Geoffrey Levene, director of
global business development for data science workstations.
“Now [the phrase] has caught up to us; data doubles every
18 months in every vertical.” From one industry to the next
the process is similar, Levene says. Data must be “wrangled,”
formally known as extract transform load (ETL). “Then you
write the code to see what the data can do,” he explains.
From the exploration, the data scientist builds a model of the
data use case. “This is the training part, used for inference and
prediction,” Levene says. “Training is time-consuming; inference
is fast. ETL is a lengthy process.” The workflow usually involved
tabular data and “GPUs can accelerate tabular data,” he says.
Having a “personal sandbox” for data work is a boon for data
scientists, Levene says. “Some are finding they do a week’s work in
one day with GPU-accelerated workflows.” Levene also observes
that “98% of AI for product development is machine learning.”
Artificial intelligence has been around for a generation,
Levene notes, but there wasn’t enough data in many indus-
tries. Now data is abundant, thanks to both the internet and
mobile devices. “Go back a year ago—you either bought
time on a cloud GPU or spent up to $500,000 on a system”
that took weeks for IT to install, says Levene. “Now you can
order a couple of workstations and go to work.” DERandall S. Newton is principal analyst at Consilia Vektor, covering
engineering technology. He has been part of the computer graphics
industry since 1985. Contact him at [email protected].INFO ➜Dell: Dell.com
➜Lenovo: Lenovo.com
➜Lockheed Martin Rotary & Mission Systems:
LockheedMartin.com
➜NVIDIA: NVIDIA.com
➜Velocity Micro: VelocityMicro.com
For more information on this topic, visit DigitalEngineering247.com.//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Computex Announcements
Reshape WorkstationsA
MD, Intel and NVIDIA all introduced new
technologies and products at the recent
Computex trade show in Taiwan that were of
interest to workstation users.
AMD announced a significant update to its Zen
2 core, the technology used in its Ryzen and EPYC
processors. The company claims the new core runs
15% more instructions per clock cycle than its pre-
decessor, using larger cache sizes and a redesigned
floating point engine. The Zen 2 core will power
the 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen 9 processor, a new
high-end CPU in the Ryzen line designed for work-
stations. It offers 12 cores/24 threads and is the only
CPU or graphics processing unit central processor
on the market built with 7nm lithography.
AMD also announced a new motherboard chipset
(X570 for socket AM4) that offers the first availability of
PCIe 4.0. It claims this generation of PCIe offers 42%
faster storage performance than the previous version,
and can double motherboard bandwidth compared
with the previous version. AMD says it anticipates
more than 50 new motherboard models to ship in the
next few months from a variety of vendors.
Intel announced its next-generation CPU platform
Ice Lake, an integrated heterogeneous computing
architecture with enhancements for artificial intel-
ligence and deep learning. The company claims its
Intel Deep Learning Boost (DL Boost) addition to the
CPU and new AI instructions on the CPU’s integrated
graphics driver will “usher in a new era of intelligent
performance for PCs.” Intel claims DL Boost can offer
up to 8.8x higher peak AI inference throughput than
comparable products. DL Boost AI accelerators will
also be available in the Xeon line of workstation and
server CPUs. Intel claims common AI workloads such
as image recognition and segmentation as well as
object detection will run up to 14 times faster than the
previous generation of Xeon processors.
NVIDIA announced the launch of new mobile
workstations from several vendors using the Quadro
RTX line of mobile GPUs. The RTX line for mobile
brings the same specs as the desktop line, but in a
mobile form factor. It offers real-time photorealistic
rendering, AI acceleration and 8K video support for
content creation including virtual reality. Dell, HP,
Lenovo and MSI were among the vendors with new
mobile workstations using the latest RTX technology.DE_0819_Specialized_Workstations_Newton.indd 32 7/11/19 11:15 AM