Editor’s Pick: Rack Up Visual Computing Power

Dear DE Reader:

In this age of immediately being too slow, time and horsepower often collide with your need to do other profitable work. All that stuff like photorealistic rendering for stunning product visualizations, collaborative design reviews and so on can introduce serious latency delays into workflows, especially in design-intensive joints where visualization workflows are key. Today's Editor's Pick of the Week offers what sounds like an elegant solution for this sort of productivity drag.

BOXX Technologies has been lifting the covers for a peek at its new BOXX APEXX 8R server for the past few months. They recently made the official announcement of its availability. The blurb on it is that the BOXX APEXX 8R is engineered to handle and accelerate rendering and similar graphics-intensive jobs in a networked environment. The exclamation point on that description is that the BOXX APEXX 8R is a certified NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance (VCA).

What that means for you and your outfit is really fast graphics response. If you're still starting a rendering and going home for the night, you probably will not need to do that anymore. The decision-making delay between fiddling around then waiting to see “if that change does it” and the results to make your decision should be reduced significantly.

A combination view of the front and rear sides of the NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance certified BOXX APEXX 8R GPU-rendering system. Image courtesy of BOXX Technologies.

Some particulars: The BOXX APEXX 8R will hold lots of graphics cards. Up to eight professional-level NVIDIA Quadro or Tesla GPUs (graphics processing units) to be precise. It's configurable with dual Intel Xeon processors, giving you the potential for up to 44 cores. It also can be equipped with up to 1TB of memory. BOXX says it supports most rendering engines like NVIDIA Iray and SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

For admins, the BOXX APEXX 8R server itself is a 4U rackmount unit. It has the requisite connections to link in with your network as well as management and monitoring capabilities that should mesh with your scheme. It's offered with a variety of removable and internal SSD (solid state drive) / SATA drive options. It seems to support most every operating system out there.

Today's Editor's Pick of the Week write-up has more details on the VCA-certified BOXX APEXX 8R. Hit the link at the end to watch a 50-second SOLIDWORKS Visualize rendering demo to get a peek at what it can do for you. (Hint: View it in full-screen mode and keep your eye on the progress report.) Good stuff.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE