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One popular question that many customers ask is, How exactly do I differentiate between a workstation and a desktop? Or If I plug in a powerful graphics card inside a desktop, will it be equivalent to a workstation?

The firm answer is, Not at all, you can never convert a desktop into a workstation just by plugging in a graphics card. They are two different species of personal computing systems, each tailor-made for doing totally different kinds of work. A workstation is designed to deliver higher performance capability than desktop personal computers.

In simple words, if you are a professional a workstation is ideally suited. A PC is a general-purpose machine designed mainly for running office productivity suites like Microsoft Office, emails, Power Point presentations, etc. Workstations are designed for users who work on high-end applications that require greater graphics capability, processing power, and need multitasking ability.

The key points that differentiate a workstation from a PC being:

• Overall system reliability: Workstations are fitted with higher reliability technology than PCs. Features such as error checking and correcting (ECC) memory, larger power supplies, and more sophisticated cooling mechanisms ensure higher reliability; moreover, workstations are designed for quick (and often tool-less) upgrades and repairs.
• Application certification and overall stability: Workstations are often tested and certified by both the hardware vendor and software vendor to run specific applications, which need high computation and graphics power. Users are assured that they are using a tried-and-true combination of hardware, system software, and applications.
• Enhanced performance: Workstations are engineered to provide the best performance available for a specific set of applications that typically have large resource requirements (i.e., memory, disk, I/O, and/or graphics subsystems).
• Wide range of graphics: Workstations provide a more elaborate support such as professional graphics cards for large and tough 3D visualization, OpenGL support, and specific application support to maximize on-screen performance.
• Greater expandability: Workstations are designed with more headroom for additional components. For example, additional (and higher-powered) PCI slots, higher RAM capacity through increased number of memory slots, higher disk capacity, and higher capacity power supplies.

To Choose Between
The intended usage pattern and the type of software that a person plans to use are important factors. If one were using any workstation application, then the need would be higher levels of performance, reliability, and flexibility as compared to a personal platform. Further, there is also a need for high level of support and expertise from hardware vendors.

There are a number of key applications that benefit from the power of a workstation such as design and simulation in engineering and manufacturing, oil and gas, digital content creation (DCC) and entertainment, financial applications and power office users, geographical information systems (GIS), architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC).

Multi-core Workstations: Multi-core workstations that are quite popular nowadays can accommodate two numbers of Quad-core processors. In other words, users can harness the power of 8 processor cores from a workstation which can sit on your desk.

Thus, a frequently asked question is about the number of processors a person should use in their workstations. This obviously depends a lot on the type of software that a person intends to use. For example, for multithreaded applications whose performance increases as you increase the number of cores, it is better to buy the maximum number of cores possible. CAE, CFD, rendering, etc are normally multi-threaded and can get tremendous benefit from running on multi-core workstations.

But in the case of CAD applications or digital content creation applications that are not really multi-threaded, simply increasing the number of cores cannot increase the productivity of the workstations. In this case, the workflow of the workstation needs to be changed. Scalable Workflow is a concept that is very relevant for such non-multithreaded applications.

In the Scalable Workflow concept, in order to take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores, a multi-threaded application or simply more than one application must be run at the same time. Multi-threaded applications typically show good performance scaling as more processor cores are added. Using multiple applications on the other hand can scale much better, as their tasks are completely separate, and their scaling is only limited by availability of system resources.

In case of making a purchase for a workstation, the desirable features to look for are:

• Specialized tools that come bundled with workstations to automatically fine-tune the performance of the workstations and to suit several MCAD, CAE, DCC, GIS, and AEC software
• Software that enable remote collaboration and visualization of complicated models over very large distances, connected by a network
• Superior mechanical design of the workstation that ensures quiet operations and optimal heat dissipation
• Toolless chassis, very wide graphics card offerings high reliability, and large expandability of systems
• Easy manageability tools to simplify IT management and lower TCO
• Security tools to protect the intellectual property of corporates. Very high levels of physical, identity, data, and network security are assured with the help of several hardware and software tools
• Specialized support and personalized after sales service. Multiple-tiers of support and escalation levels must be clearly defined and offered to high-end users
• Standard, comprehensive, onsite 3 years warranty with an option to extend warranty up to 5 years
• Conformance to very stringent safety and regulatory standards
• Buy-back schemes for your current systems

Green Workstations: Though a workstation may have several good technical features, it is not really a good workstation, unless it is environmental friendly. The 80 PLUS efficient power supply is a popular standard. 80 PLUS is a specification developed by an independent non-governmental organization (www.80plus.org).

An 80 PLUS power supply ensures the same performance while saves money on energy costs on each workstation installation. Actual savings depend on specific configurations and the model used. It provides better power supply efficiency leading to less heat output and, consequently, less fan noise, thus contributing to a better office environment. The utility company supplying power saves money on electrical infrastructure if all the energy demand is power factor corrected (PFC). Using a power factor corrected workstation can help your organization meet its environmental stewardship goals. Better for the environment, using less energy, more efficiently in an office environment results in a smaller carbon footprint.

Moving a step forward, several of the workstations also conform to a standard called Energy Star 4, which is an extremely stringent standard. Energy Star is a joint program of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy helping save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices (www.energystar.gov). Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) rating is yet another standard.

Future Workstations: Blade Workstations is one such new area. Rather than placing the workstations computing power at the users desk, the computing power, in the form of blade workstations, is moved to the data center where the workstations can be easily, securely, and inexpensively managed. Centralizing an organizations workstations in the data center provides many benefits, including improved uptime and business continuity, remote management capabilities, fault tolerant design, re-provisioning capabilities, outstanding uptime, etc.

The blade workstations offer enhanced data security by ensuring that business-critical data remains in the data center and offer reduced IT costs to a large extent by centralizing your organizations workstations into the data center and by taking advantage remote management tools.

Anurag Gupta
The author is country category manager, Workstations, Personal Systems Group, HP India.
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

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