Check it Out: Check Out the RenderStation G/CAD from PSSC Labs

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

I had the chance to speak with Alex Lesser of PSSC Labs over the weekend about some of the things they’re working on that you’ll learn about in the coming months. Nice guy. Now, PSSC Labs, as many of you know, is one of the early and often innovators in high-performance computing. Perhaps best known for its PowerWulf clusters and PowerServe servers, PSSC Labs earns its reputation by hand-crafting supercomputers. They leverage commodity hardware and open source software to solve the gnarliest design, engineering, and science problems in areas as diverse as automotive, biology research, computational fluid dynamics, electronic design automation, medical imaging, numerical analysis, weather forecasting, and oil and gas.

Commodity hardware and open source mean plug-and-play, flexibility, expandability, the latest technologies, ease of use for end users as well as IT admins, power, and affordability as compared to closed systems. Hand-crafting means that PSSC Labs configures and optimizes its products for the job they’re intended to do. A good example of that is the company’s RenderStation G/CAD server.

The RenderStation G/CAD server is a turnkey HPC system intended for designers, engineers, modelers, and architects working with huge data sets in highly intensive 3D environments. As its name implies, the RenderStation G/CAD serves as an optimized platform for compute-intensive jobs like assigning realistic materials to 3D objects, exploiting predefined libraries of physically accurate materials, simulating real-world lighting, and rendering complex interactive scenes. BTW, it’s certified for such CAD and DCC applications as Bunkspeed Shot.

Supporting AMD FirePro and NVIDIA (GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla) graphics subsystems and using Intel Xeon multicore processors, the RenderStation G/CAD can handle up to 144GB of RAM, four storage units, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet or Infiniband network device adapters. The RenderStation G/CAD is engineered so that you can expand it with more memory, network interconnects, hard drives, and what have you easily—and easily means having company technicians available to help you at no additional cost. Speaking of cost, pricing for the RenderStation G/CAD starts at $7,995.

Blab-a-lots like me once plotzed over the potential we saw in high-performance computing to change how you design, analyze, and render. It’s fair to so that HPC has lived up to its advanced press. But truth be told, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Check out the RenderStation G/CAD from this link to see why when it comes to rendering large data sets, you may not have seen anything yet until now.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering