HPC Handbook: Investing in Workstations vs. Consumer PCs

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of Chapter 5 from The Design Engineer’s High-Performance Computing Handbook. Download the complete version here.

All professional workstations are computers, but not all computers are professional workstations. If you are only running MS Office applications, you can use just about any computer. But engineers running CAD, CAE or rendering software, you really should not be using just any computer. You need a workstation certified to run your software. Yet many companies provide their engineering professionals with standard consumer-grade personal computers.

Why? It may be a cost issue. After all, workstations cost more, don’t they? Not really. There is not that big of a difference in price between entry-level workstations and consumer PCs that seem comparable on paper, and even high-end consumer systems are not ideal for professional engineering work, according to Richard Runnells, director of Marketing for Solid Edge at Siemens PLM Software.

“While in some instances using a high-end consumer PC or even a gaming PC may work to meet the minimum requirements for desktop CAD applications, typically these systems are maxed out and provide little to no room for future expansion,” he says. “The cost of an entry-level workstation, which comes pre-configured and certified to run CAD applications, such as Solid Edge, is in many cases lower in price than that of a top-of-the-line gaming PC.”

Jeff Wood, vice president of Product Management for workstation and thin client business at HP agrees. “Buyers are missing a huge benefit in productivity when they opt for the consumer PC. The workstations have been highly tuned for professional applications,” he says.

Calculating Return on Investment

The length of time it takes to pay off a new workstation via increased productivity will vary depending on the amount of time spent doing design engineering, the engineer’s salary, the amount of time saved, and the price of the workstation.

While studies show a wide range of productivity improvements, let’s use some conservative numbers and calculate the return on investment (ROI) one might expect to achieve by upgrading from a PC to a workstation. For this example, we will assume that our engineers are paid a salary of $80,000 per year and spend one-third of their time actually using CAD software. So $27,000 of their salary is devoted to time spent using CAD. We will also use a conservative estimate of a 30 percent increase in design productivity achieved by investing in a new workstation.

Workstation ROI Calculation

• Cost of a new workstation: $4,500

• Cost of the engineer’s time: $80,000/year at 250 working days per year at 8 hours per day= $40 per hour

• Time spent doing design work: One-third of an 8-hour day= 2.64 hours each day

• Time saved using workstation: 33% of 2.64 hours a day = about 54 minutes per day at 250 working days per year = 225 hours per year

Based on these numbers, the amount that could be saved annually by upgrading to an engineering workstation can be calculated as follows:

• 225 hours per year at $40 per hour = $9,000 per year

Clearly, the engineering workstation can pay for itself.

More Reasons to Upgrade

Even if you already use a workstation, you should seriously consider an upgrade if that workstation is more than three years old.

The larger the model the more time it takes to compute, manipulate and store on the same system. On older workstations, large models sap your ability to innovate and your company’s ability to compete. By some estimates, CAD model sizes double every two years, yet most companies hold onto their workstations for more than four years and many only update core CAD software every fifth release.

Even if you do upgrade your software more often than that, you may be paying a huge performance penalty. Installing the latest engineering software on underpowered hardware can further decrease the speed with which you design. New versions of CAD, CAE, and visualization software typically offer improved productivity, but software designed to take advantage of the latest advances in hardware can run slower if you install it on an older computer.

In one study conducted by Lenovo, the company pitted two similarly equipped workstations against each other running SolidWorks 2013. Both systems had identical amounts of memory and solid state hard drives. The ThinkStation S30 completed the identical design task more than twice as fast as the three-year-old S20.

“Giving engineers a new workstation is really the foundation for innovation,” says Tom Salomone, Engineering and AEC and Manufacturing Segment Marketing Manager at Lenovo. “You want them to compute as fast as they think. You don’t want their computers slowing them down.”

Similar results have been reported by customers. In a case study published by Lenovo, the McLaren Mercedes Formula One racing team upgraded the hardware it uses to run its CAD, engineering, and simulation software. The design team was expecting modest performance gains of about 2% and they would have been happy with that. “We have come to realize that we may have massively underestimated this,” said Alan Dueden, lead systems engineer at the McLaren Technology Center. “A figure 10 times that might be a little nearer to the mark.” Their MIDAS simulations were 30 percent faster, assembly drawing changes improved 25 percent, and parametric updates were 60 percent faster.

Quite simply, the right tool for an engineer’s job is a professional workstation. Without professional workstations, a company’s innovation engine is stalled. The engineer’s pace of work gets reduced to match the sluggish speed of outdated or inadequate hardware. Yet workstations are more capable and affordable than ever. Their return on investment is outstanding.

For design engineers, a professional workstation means more time spent creating new products and improving existing ones and less time spent waiting for large assemblies to load or simulations to run. For IT specialists, equipping power users like design engineers with professional workstations means less time spent diagnosing and fixing issues. And for executive management, investing in an affordable professional workstation can pay for itself in a very short time.

The decision to invest in a professional engineering workstation is not just about the bottom line. It’s about making better designs, speeding up the design cycle, and growing the business.