Dell and Nvidia used SolidWorks World to show off a variety of power user technologies.

By Kathleen Maher

Dell and Nvidia took their partnership to SolidWorks World recently, where they showed the Nvidia Grid at work enabling SolidWorks users to use virtualization and Nvidia’s compression technology to run SolidWorks on Dell’s Wyse thin clients. Now, there is a good sized army of SolidWorks users who have no intention of doing their jobs on a thin client. In many offices, the biggest baddest machine goes to the top dog engineer and older machines are passed down. This culture isn’t going to change overnight.

Dell showed its rack mounted Precisions, which can be used in remote situations where a thin client has a one-to-one relationship with workstations in the back room. Dell says it’s seeing these setups being increasingly used in factory settings where expensive machines could get damaged or in situations where security is an issue.

And in a third scenario for designers, Nvidia and Dell have the Maximus arrangements, which give power users the best of all worlds. Maximus-equipped workstations running both Quadro and Tesla boards can optimize heavy-duty tasks like rendering or analysis to run independently without disrupting heavy compute sessions with products like SolidWorks, or, in comparable situations Maya, or Inventor.