Dell Solutions for SOLIDWORKS Community – SWW Interview

Sanjay Gangal interviewed Chris Ramirez, Strategical Alliances Manager at Dell at the 2019 SOLIDWORKS World Conference in Dallas, Texas. Here is the video and transcript of the interview.

SG: Tell us; What brings Dell to SOLIDWORKS World 2019?

CR: We’re absolutely thrilled to be here! SOLIDWORKS users make up one of the most vibrant communities that we have between Dell and SOLIDWORKS. So, I’m here to talk about the latest Dell Precision Workstations that we think is right up the alley for the traditional SOLIDWORKS user. Our line-up of Dell Precision workstations goes from our 3000 series class up to our 7000 series class. You can view the 3000 as a sports car and the 7000 as an earth moving bulldozer.

The right thing for this crowd is something that has a high frequency CPU – doesn’t need a lot of cores; because SOLIDWORKS primarily is single cored, that can take advantage of the brilliant GPU acceleration coming from our friends at NVIDIA with the RTX 4000. That’s what we’re demoing in our booth! Those combined with a tech preview of SOLIDWORKS Visualize where they’re actually taking advantage of the real-time ray-tracing cores inside the RTX 4000. So, what that means to those people that are familiar with Visualize is: they can come by my booth, grab the monitor, take a photo-realistic image that we’ve got up or a photo-realistic model that we have up and rotate that model anyway they want to and within three or four seconds, it renders photo-realistic. (SG: wow!) Instead of having to do a rendering overnight or it will take several hours to render, we can now do it in seconds. The advent of real-time, photo-realistic rendering is huge to this audience. And we wanted to show off that work that we’re doing with NVIDIA and SOLIDWORKS.

SG: Yes. This real-time rendering is something really, really big. And there’s a come about based on the new NVIDIA graphics cards which support AI.

CR: Correct. Whenever you actually turn the model, you’ll see these points, because that’s it, modeling the individual, basically light rays pixels bouncing off. So you’ll see that and then to finish doing the final result, it’ll utilize the AI to interpolate in between those points to resolve even faster. So the combination of AI with the real-time ray-tracing cores really is, I think, a phenomenal advent for this market. We know that within the engineering community, there are those that have more of the evolutionary approach. They will continue to do the workflows as they do them today. But the SOLIDWORKS community, when you consider most of them are kind of smaller, more nimble companies that can change their workflows, and do real-time, photo-realistic ray tracing. We can bring in some AI components, we can utilize VR not just for design review but for design creation. These are some things that we think this crowd gravitates to and the crowds of our booth have been tremendous.

SG: Yeah, essentially this completely changes the model of how you design and render. When you can do it in real-time, you can do a lot of things that you couldn’t do otherwise.

CR: That’s correct. So really, when you look at the change of how the engineering work flow will happen. The bottom line, I know it sounds super technical, but really it’s about being able to produce more quality products and a faster time to market. That’s really what you’re after, right? So you’re able to compress your design cycle but continue to create high quality products in a shorter time span. That’s what everyone wants.

SG: And what makes a Dell/NVIDIA combination unique and differentiated in the marketplace compared to somebody else using the NVIDIA card?

CR: Dell has a very tight relationship with our friends at NVIDIA. And the bottom line, we’re able to show off the tech preview between SOLIDWORKS and NVIDIA because we are one of their core partners. One of the aspects that makes our product line a little different is with our Dell Precision Optimizer software that is something that’s included on every Precision workstation that we have, and so this utilizes AI actually to track to see what you’re doing. This is Dell’s specific software that’s seeing how you’re utilizing your workstation and then you can toggle specific settings to optimize the speed of the system that you’re running.

From an IT technical admin perspective, they can actually say, “In my crowd of 40 engineers, who’s utilizing the system beyond it’s capabilities? Who do we need to actually bump up in CPU speed or give a better GPU? And who is maybe not stressing their systems out?” So it allows them to right size their resourcing on their workstations for their engineers. And that’s something unique to Dell as well, that NVIDIA and SOLIDWORKS greatly appreciate it, as well as our ISV certification for our drivers. So, that’s not just the GPU drivers, that’s the drivers up and down the stack of our mobile workstations and our tower workstations. Just tell the SOLIDWORKS community that this system is going to run SOLIDWORKS better than anyone else in the industry.

SG: Okay. And what is the best way for people to find out about the solutions for this community on the internet?

CR: On the internet, www.dell.com/precision.

Tags: Dell, SOLIDWORKS

This entry was posted on Friday, March 8th, 2019 at 10:52 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.