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In 1995, this paper was written to be the single reference on how Windows NT Workstation could be used in the engineering and scientific workstation market. After publishing this paper, I shifted responsibilities to focus on vertical marketing activities into the engineering market. This white paper was built around six major sections:

By this time, some of the links referenced in this article may no longer be active. Although some have been updated to stay current, I haven't had time to update the others. Other related papers that I've written include:

Windows NT Workstation in Engineering and Science

A White Paper from the Business Systems Technology Series
August 1995

About the Microsoft Business Systems Technology Series

The Microsoft Business Systems Technology Series consists of a number of interrelated white papers dedicated to educating IT professionals and advanced users, such as engineers and scientists, about Windows NT and the Microsoft BackOffice™ family of products. While current Microsoft technologies are often covered, the objective of this series is to offer an idea of how major technologies are evolving, how Microsoft will use those technologies, and what it means to technology planners and users.

Abstract

This paper will assist in the evaluation of workstation operating systems used by engineers and scientists. Microsoft Windows NT Workstation is a powerful desktop operating system for the most demanding engineering, scientific and manufacturing applications. Windows NT enables better integration between existing productivity applications and the new generation of 32-bit applications. All applications benefit from the Windows NT robust architecture, preemptive multitasking, network access, security, and reliability. Combined with the mix of available productivity and specialized applications, these factors make Windows NT Workstation ideal for technical users.

Executive Summary

If you are an engineer, scientist, or other technical professional, your work depends on your ability to use high-powered workstations efficiently. Today, however, over 80% of these advanced users need to use both a UNIX workstation and a personal computer to get their jobs done—often having multiple systems on their desk. This resource duplication costs you money and can decrease efficiency. There is a solution:  Microsoft^® Windows NT™ Workstation can dramatically reduce these costs and inefficiencies by giving you the ability to run technical and productivity applications on a single computer.

For example, how much money do you spend on hardware today? Consolidating all of your applications on a single system with Windows NT Workstation can free up to 75% of a typical hardware budget.

“With the Windows user interface we provide a complete push-button environment for our designers, so instead of having to write code they can do what they’re hired to do—create spectacular animation. As a result, they’re probably five times more productive than they would be in a UNIX environment.”
Paul Bryant, Foundation Imaging, Inc.

You can easily save more than the cost of hardware. How much time do you spend transferring and converting documents, drawings, or other data between different systems? Within a typical workgroup of 10 engineers or scientists, every hour per week that each user spends doing these simple tasks results in over three man-months of lost productivity per year. This effort should be used to gain a competitive advantage.

Windows NT Workstation offers users the best of both UNIX and PC environments. Windows NT gives you all of the architectural strengths and high performance levels offered by UNIX-based systems coupled with all the benefits of using the Microsoft Windows operating system®. Its reliability is unmatched on a personal computer platform. This paper will discuss the following advantages offered by Windows NT Workstation:

Today, Windows NT Workstation is being widely adopted in the technical community. By the end of 1995, Windows NT is predicted to outsell all other leading workstation operating systems. This paper will show you why Windows NT Workstation is the premier workstation operating system for technical users.

Improving Productivity with Better Application Integration

Integrating data and applications to improve productivity

Your computers must be able to juggle multiple tasks efficiently. Engineers and scientists must be able to react quickly to the rapidly changing demands of today’s business and technical environments. On average, scientists and engineers spend no more than half of their time using their main technical application. The remainder is used to perform secondary tasks such as email, project management, document reviews, and other project-related tasks¾often on separate computers. Windows NT Workstation can increase productivity dramatically by consolidating these activities onto a single system and integrating applications and data more closely with the main project.

In today’s competitive environment, engineers must respond quickly to market demands. There are two factors that force engineers to participate more completely in the day-to-day business processes of their companies:  concurrent engineering and the need to integrate engineering with other departments and into the business decision process. Similarly, scientists are increasingly dependent on similar business processes to coordinate joint research projects and interactions with various agencies.

Example: It’s not easy for UNIX users to share drawings or other data with personal computer users. Designs must be rendered to a file on a workstation and sent, via NFS or ftp, to a server. The PC user retrieves the file from the server and then converts it to a format his or her word processor understands. With Windows NT, it’s as simple as dragging a rendered image onto a document. And, with OLE, it’s even easier to maintain documents by linking the actual designs into the document so that design changes are automatically reflected.

Windows NT provides a single, high-performance operating system that helps integrate traditional engineering and scientific applications with basic productivity applications. With Windows NT, a single computer can run all these applications while providing a consistent user interface and complete access to networking, file and printer/plotter resources. Technical users benefit by working on a single system that is both powerful and cost-effective.

With Windows NT, you no longer need to switch between a dedicated workstation and a personal computer. This ability to integrate applications and share data more easily on a single system can result in reduced costs for hardware, training, and support. The key to this scenario is leveraging integration between applications and sharing data to improve the workflow and increase productivity. OLE and similar mechanisms within Windows NT are the cornerstones of these improved integration and productivity enhancements.

OLE:  The foundation for integrating applications and data

How many times have you wanted to simply transfer data or diagrams between different applications­—yet been stymied because of incompatibilities between the applications or because the operating system doesn’t allow such transfers to occur naturally? This can be difficult to do in any computing environment, particularly in advanced technical fields where applications and data models are so complicated. The bottom line is that you want your applications to work together on a single system and to be consistent in order to easily share data between applications which may not use common data formats.

OLE is Microsoft’s answer to this problem. OLE object technology is used to integrate data across many different applications—enabling a high degree of application compatibility and open interoperability. For instance, OLE allows different applications to work together so that users can easily create compound documents that incorporate diverse types of information. The success of integrated application suites, such as Microsoft Office, serves as evidence of this end-user demand.

OLE is based on the Common Object Model (COM), which provides standard interfaces and inter-component communication. Because COM is a binary standard, OLE software components can be written in any language and can be supplied by any software vendor, yet still be seamlessly integrated within a single application. COM allows software component upgrades without affecting the operation of the overall solution. COM can also be used by corporate developers and system integrators to build custom components. These custom components can be easily integrated into any OLE-enabled application.

Together, Windows NT and OLE can improve business processes within, for example, a manufacturing company. Suppose the sales team uses a spreadsheet to maintain order data with quantity and widget dimensions specified by each customer. The spreadsheet can be sent, as an object in an email message, to the engineering department. In turn, an engineer can embed the spreadsheet into a design file (shown at left) and link the dimensions into the design. Finally, the modified design can be sent back to the sales department so that the complete product specifications can be included within an order confirmation letter.

This workflow process—using objects as a way to improve data integration between different applications and departments—enables the company to be more flexible and responsive to the needs of their customers. Improved internal communications reduces opportunities for error while increasing productivity.

OLE supports a wide range of functions. For technical users, the following OLE capabilities are likely to be of interest: 

OLE helps solve the problem of integrating data and applications. OLE gives you compatibility and consistency between applications created by a single vendor and, more importantly, between applications created by different software vendors. The result helps improve productivity by offering you the ability to share data more completely.

OLE for Design and Modeling simplifies integration of complex data

Today, it is difficult to share complex data between applications without physically converting data to a new format—often needing a multi-step conversion process or custom conversion tools. This extra effort can eliminate the productivity gains you expected from using advanced applications. OLE for Design and Modeling is a set of OLE extensions intended to make data sharing even easier.

Within the technical community, data models are more complex and can vary enormously between applications. The technology behind OLE for Design and Modeling supports the real world geometry engines required by CAD/CAM and GIS applications.

With this capability, you can integrate graphical objects, such as product schematics, from different sources and in a variety of data formats rather than simply transferring static pictorial data between applications. By ensuring that you can manipulate physical objects while retaining the spatial integrity and dimensions of those objects, your productivity can improve.

An application that understands only its own data format will fail to handle unfamiliar data models. Although some applications include conversion utilities, often users are forced to use static pictures or, even worse, to manually reenter data into a new application. OLE for Design and Modeling makes it possible to combine objects from several OLE-enabled applications to form a composite result. All OLE-enabled applications may contribute to the same model without requiring data translation.

Software developers, both commercial and in-house, can use OLE for Design and Modeling to build open software components that interact to produce OLE documents containing 2D and 3D objects. Those objects will maintain geometric relationships with one another in a real world setting. And, unlike proprietary systems, OLE for Design and Modeling provides an open framework where objects in different graphical formats from many different sources come together to form a unified model.

With OLE for Design and Modeling, Windows NT Workstation is the premier design environment. You can define and manipulate complex arrangements of 2D and 3D objects generated by CAD/CAM/CAE and GIS applications and share the objects with project scheduling, cost estimating, electronic mail, or other productivity applications.

Your choice of leading engineering and scientific applications

Leading workstation applications are already available for Windows NT. Further, engineering and scientific vendors realize that Windows NT expands their potential markets. It enables them to offer powerful applications on systems hardware that is more widely available than proprietary workstations.

Windows NT is the first personal computer operating system that delivers the power needed for these applications. Leading engineering CAD/CAM vendors, such as Parametric Technology Corporation, Intergraph, Autodesk, Viewlogic and RASNA, have already delivered applications for Windows NT. Other vendors also offer high performance scientific and data analysis applications, such as the mass spectrometry system pictured at left.

Also, because Windows NT offers backwards compatibility with 16-bit applications, you can use a wide variety of productivity and office automation applications. The Win32® API, common across both Windows® 95 and Windows NT, helps ensure that the next generation of productivity applications will be available on both operating systems. Altogether, the widespread availability of technical and productivity applications available for Windows NT allows you to stop searching for an operating system and lets you be more effective in getting your work done.

Representative technical applications available for Windows NT

The following vendor and product list is representative of hundreds of advanced engineering and scientific solutions that are already available for Windows NT.

Table 1 - Representative workstation-class applications.

High Performance Computing on a Broad Range of Hardware

Workstation users need powerful systems because they have work that needs to get done. However, traditional solutions often lock users into proprietary hardware choices. UNIX workstations can be very expensive—often starting at $15k for a reasonably configured entry-level system for technical users and extending over $60k for top-of-the-line systems. Wouldn’t it be nice to choose from thousands of systems—covering both Intel® and RISC CPUs—that offer scalability and high performance options for demanding applications? Windows NT provides you with exactly this kind of open solution.

Windows NT offers a complete 32-bit environment that provides the performance of a workstation across multiple hardware platforms. Three factors provide these capabilities:  portability across different system hardware; scalability for more CPU bandwidth; and a high-performance operating system.

Portability means a choice of hardware

Have you ever felt that you were stuck with a particular brand of systems hardware even though it might not give you the best performance? The choice of hardware available for Windows NT means that you can pick and choose the hardware that best meets the needs of your applications. Windows NT now supports four different CPU architectures:  Intel’s 386/486/Pentium® and compatible microprocessors, Digital Equipment Corporation’s Alpha AXP™, MIPS® Technology’s R4X00, and IBM/Motorola’s PowerPC™.

The Windows NT architecture is designed with a microprocessor-independent layer, the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), that ensures compatibility with today’s fastest microprocessors. The HAL also ensures that any new microprocessor can be supported quickly and consistently. Hardware independence allows users to choose between many systems to get the best performance¾for example, Windows NT is currently supported on over 4,000 computer systems. Windows NT is unique in that it is the only operating system that supports identical programming interfaces (the Win32 API), object technologies (OLE), and networking across four microprocessor families.

Table 2 - Windows NT systems, compared to popular workstations, are cost-effective. Efficiency measures price/performance - lower is better.

With the choices this portability ensures, Windows NT Workstation offers power equivalent to traditional workstation systems. A typical benchmark uses Parametric Technology Corporation’s Pro/ENGINEER software, a powerful design and modeling tool, to model performance. This test uses a combination of computational and graphics functions to model a typical engineer’s system usage. It is representative of the demands that advanced users place on workstations.

The results show that the Windows NT systems (in this case, MIPS-based systems from NeTpower) can complete the tests in a time period much quicker than entry-level UNIX systems and are roughly equivalent to the mid-range UNIX systems. The final column, labeled ‘Efficiency’, shows that Windows NT systems are up to twice as cost-effective by comparing the results on a price/performance basis.

Portability helps protect your infrastructure investment by ensuring that you have a choice of hardware that you can use today and tomorrow. Because Windows NT is designed to be portable, any vendor can offer Windows NT on their systems—and this lets you make the right selection of computing equipment for your applications.

Scalability extends performance to higher levels

With advanced technical applications, you can run out of CPU horsepower fairly easily. Rather than investing in a new, much more costly system, wouldn’t you rather pop the cover off the chassis and simply add a second CPU? In addition to the hardware independence offered by Windows NT’s portable architecture and the performance benefits you can get from an initial selection of a high-performance CPU, Windows NT was designed to support multiple processors within a single system. This lets you squeeze even more performance from your system.

Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) technology is used to get higher levels of performance. The Windows NT kernel enables multiprocessor support by allocating threads (small, independent executable components of applications) based on the thread’s priority across all available CPUs in a system. Any thread of any application can run independently on any available processor.

Even though the best performance increase will come from multi-threaded applications, you will often get a small performance boost running even a single threaded application on a multi-processor system. The Windows NT kernel dispatches all operating system threads across all available processors, including I/O, networking, and graphics.

The combination of portability, symmetric multiprocessing support, and the multithreading capabilities offered by Windows NT, results in a choice of systems hardware for Windows NT that meets the needs of even the most demanding users in the engineering and scientific community.

High-performance graphics boost visualization of data and designs

Many workstation applications use high-performance, high-resolution graphics to get the most realistic visual representation of data and designs. Until 1994, these high-end graphics capabilities were only found on expensive workstations. However, with the release of Windows NT 3.5, you now have an integrated option to get the same powerful graphics capabilities on personal computers.

Windows NT is the first commercial personal computer operating system to offer high performance 3‑D graphics features in a mainstream operating system by integrating the OpenGL 3‑D interfaces. High-performance graphics capabilities, such as those provided by OpenGL, form an extremely important foundation for many engineering, data visualization, and virtual reality applications. (See the OpenGL technology brief for details.)

Silicon Graphics originally introduced the IRIS GL (Graphics Language) graphics engine for use on their proprietary workstation systems. This technology enabled the development of powerful 3‑dimensional graphics applications. OpenGL was eventually developed as an open version of IRIS GL that could run on computer systems from other vendors. Today, OpenGL is the standard 3‑D interface supported by workstation hardware and software vendors.

Many workstation applications support advanced 3‑D graphics using OpenGL technology today—including leading vendors in mechanical design and modeling, architectural drafting, animation, and virtual reality. Already, Windows NT applications from Parametric Technology, Intergraph and others use this advanced 3‑D rendering engine in their Windows NT applications.

In order to offer the greatest flexibility to users, Windows NT supports OpenGL using any one of three different modes. Any video adapter can be used with Windows NT using the software rendering mode. A variety of accelerated video drivers is available for the higher performance modes - and many more are in development.