Today, I’d like to welcome Matthias Stiller, CEO and Head of Development at PI-VR for a guest post:

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For those who wonder what VRED is: VRED is a highly specialized software provided by the PI-VR GmbH, a software vendor based in Germany. PI-VR develops innovative software solutions for 3D real-time visualization, Virtual Prototyping and offline image production which are used over the complete life cycle of product development: from design over engineering to marketing and sales. Being especially progressive software, VRED can be used in different application areas for real-time high-end 3D visualizations and offers the possibility to quickly and realistically compile high-quality illustrations of CAD data. The instant and interactive visual feedback, innovative and easy-to-use tools as well as the implementation of new technologies culminate in impressive results and very fast and effective working processes.

In other words: VRED is the ideal software for benchmarking Fujitsu CELSIUS Workstations.

When Fujitsu came up with their new ultra high-end workstation in April 2012, we decided to test the CELSIUS R920 Workstation with our latest software release VRED 5.5

The question simply is how the VRED application performance will improve with the new hardware technology. Our goal always is to minimize render time at best image quality and maximum hardware resource utilization.

So this is what we did: We installed the software on the previous generation workstation flagship CELSIUS R670 (with two Intel® Xeon X5765 processors each offering 6 processor cores running at 3.06 Ghz) as well as on the new generation dual processor flagship CELSIUS R920 (with the two fastest processors you can get from the current platform). The Intel® Xeon® E5-2687W which offers 8 (!) processor cores running at 3.1 Ghz). And guess what, while running the test the software totally maxed out all processor cores while producing the attached image in FullHD resolution (1920×1080). Never has a workstation been more busy to perform a job in VRED. In a head to head comparison the Fujitsu CELSIUS R920 excels and finished rendering the complete image after astonishing 69 seconds while the CELSIUS R670 finished after respectable 100 seconds. That’s 31% percent faster!

We are really excited about the new generation of Fujitsu CELSIUS workstations.

The cooperation with our partners at Fujitsu and Intel make sure that our software utilizes all available multi-core power to shorten image production time even more. That’s especially important for our customers that need to produce more images in shorter time allowing them to put more creativity into their image compositions.

Matthias Stiller

PS: A complete overview of benchmarks can be seen at http://www.pi-vr.de/info/benchmark.html

The first ever company run in Augsburg was held on 8th May 2012 and it did not disappoint. Fujitsu had a presence of 169 people out of the 3,000 participants, an excellent turn out for our company, showing ourselves as a modern and ambitious firm. We were overwhelmed with the number of people wanting to take part in the name of Fujitsu. The race was 5km in length, taking place in and around Wittelsbacher Park right near the center of the city.

Fujitsu took 3^rd place in terms of participant numbers, winning a tour of local radio station, RT1’s premises. Our sumo wrestler, Geisha and samurai warrior grabbed 1^st place for best dressed as a trio, drawing much attention from runners and the many supporters alike, a very good effort. Our very own Jürgen Klein earned a respectable 9^th place in the race with a time of 00:17:30,1, the best performer for Fujitsu, excellent considering 1^st place managed an unbelievable 00:16:17,9.

This turned out to be a fun day for all involved and a great advert for the togetherness and reputation of our company. Congratulations and Thank you to all involved for making this a great day.

The SSD Form Factor Working Group, which Fujitsu is driving together with four other promoters, has defined a new common connector standard for various types of standard form factor (SFF) SSDs (2.5”/3.5” drives).

While SATA and SAS attached SFF SSDs are addressing mainstream SSD performance, PCI-Express (PCIe) SSDs are used when applications require lowest latency and highest bandwidth. So far, PCIe-SSDs always sit in a computer’s PCIe slot which means they are less service friendly than mainstream 2.5”/3.5” HDD/SSD drives. Practically speaking, you need to open the server box to plug or unplug PCIe cards, and even shut down the system before opening the box. Of course, staff in a data center do not have the time to worry about such complexity.

Luckily, those days will soon be over. The new SFF connector is fully backward compatible with today’s SATA and SAS based SFF drives, and supports all industry SSD standards currently emerging: SCSI Express, NVMe, SATA-Express, and even ML-SAS. It was a major challenge to unify the interests of all these industry groups, so the SSD Form Factor Working Group is happy to have full support from the SCSI Trade Association (STA), SATA-IO Group, and also the PCI SIG in this effort.

To find out more, you can read the official press release: http://www.ssdformfactor.org/docs/spec_1_0_press_release.pdf.

Take all your skills, all your imagination, all your energy…and start imagining. A small idea may come into your mind. Let the idea grow. Let it become a bigger idea. Let it become an idea which inspires you and fills you with energy. In your mind, take it as far as it will go, even beyond the limits of what you thought possible, affordable or even reasonable. Talk about your idea to the people closest to you. If they are inspired too, or even willing to help you, then you have most likely found something worth aiming for. What’s stopping you from putting it into practice? Is it down to having the tools? Is it down to money? Things don’t always have to be too difficult or too expensive.  Take a look at the videos below to find out more…

Today , I am happy to present another guest post from Peter Weiß. He is Head of Business at  StarkStrom Augsburg from the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg. Here is Peters post:
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Already in the initial stages of our project, Fujitsu’s Superior CELSIUS workstation has proved to be the perfect partner. As we progress further into the project, the advantages of this system are still clear for all to see.

The Fujitsu workstation processes simulations and calculations in a matter of minutes, which goes far beyond the limits of basic PC-systems’ capabilities.

We were, therefore, able to adapt the size of the tubular lattice frame in the CAD to the format of the outer casing and rapidly form the structure using FEM. This greatly facilitated our work.

In addition the elaborate and complex layout of cables in electric racing cars is gradually becoming easier to manage, with the ability to see and edit the entire vehicle on big screens, without constant jerking.

Important new applications will soon arise as a result of using simulation programs for the racing car: The experiences from testing and racing will be used to test and configure our next vehicle, before the first component is produced. In addition as such programs put computers under a lot of strain, we are very happy to have such an outstanding partner in Fujitsu. On behalf of the entire Starkstrom-Augsburg-team we would like to thank you all very much for the friendly support!

Imagine you had the necessary processing power to carry out the most computationally intensive calculations – at reasonable cost.

What would you do?

Would you go about trying to make more accurate weather predictions? An invaluable piece of information for those living in areas afflicted by monsoon, drought or tornadoes. Or maybe you would turn your attention to medicine. Would you try to find a cure for cancer, multiple sclerosis, AIDS or brain tumors? Then again, you could look at transportation. What would you do to make airplanes, trains and automobiles 100% safe? You might also try to create models around  people’s feelings or needs. When discussing these scenarios the usual responses have been related to either, a lack of horsepower or a lack of  money.

Now, with the “K computer”, the horsepower is certainly there. But, what about the money? Aren’t these computing capabilities only available to the richest government or academic institutions? By supplying the horsepower via the Cloud, this huge performance potential is becoming available to more and more businesses.

This is very much the stuff that dreams are made of…want to find out more about what you could do?
Then click on the link below and see how you can turn dreams into reality.

On February 29th, 2012 a friendly football match took place between Poland and Portugal at the brand new Polish national stadium in Warsaw. Although the game ended 0-0, I’m sure the fans in the stadium would want a souvenir of such an occasion.

Much more than that Fujitsu aided in providing all fans present in the with a 360 degree panoramic gigapixel photo. Through the use of a Fujitsu CELSIUS R670 a stunning high-resolution picture of the whole stadium could be produced during the game.The people responsible for the shooting are Piotrowski Radosław, Piotr Galas, Leszek Cuper and Paweł Cegielski. They post this 360 panoramic view of the stadium on their websites www.fantag.eu & www.pano360.pl. Fans could then visit the websites, scroll through the picture to find & tag themselves in the stadium to then be posted on Facebook. And voilà! People present at the game now had a memory of the occasion:

This type of idea is becoming ever more popular and the occasion between Poland & Portugal was used as a testshooting for Euro2012 in the summer, where there will be many more Fantag opportunities. Fujitsu will be playing a key role in the making of these 360 degree shots.

The team faced many challenges in processing the data, in terms of stitching where neighbouring pictures came together. The huge amount of data to be processed was another big challenge. The process involved taking over 800 separate pictures using a digital SLR Canon 7D with Sigma 150 mm F2.8 lens. Mounted on an automatic panoramic RODEON Station ST, photo shooting could be done at a rapid pace, to avoid distortion between photos and directly transferred onto a notebook. The old workstation used for the panorama stitching and production, with 4 cores and 16GB RAM would take 4-5 days to create the photo, however using Fujitsu CELSIUS R670, the increased speed and reliability reached far beyond our expectations and created magnificent results. The CELSIUS is equipped with two six-core XEON CPUs, 128GB of RAM and four hard disks. Using Autopano Giga 2.6 software they stitched the photos together and used Adobe Photoshop CS5 for post-production.  The resulting Gigapixel panorama has a resolution of 11,4 Gigapixels, and over 65 Gigabytes in Photoshop file format.

Overall the project was a great success and is a proof-of-concept for Euro2012.

When talking about the workplace of the future, one of the things which keeps coming up is working from home. Of course working from home is very flexible and combines business with pleasure. You can get out of bed at the same time as always, and start earlier than you normally would. Alternatively, you can sleep in a little longer and start work less stressed than if you were on the road with aspiring Formula One drivers! You could also enjoy having lunch with your family. On the other hand you can work more effectively in a quiet work environment compared to the open–plan offices most of us are used to.  All of these are very good points in favor of working from home.

Having said that, far more annoying and stressful than traffic is email. Sadly, working from home doesn’t help here. In the 1990s – I guess I’m showing my age here – email was seen as a great tool with which to share information quickly. Gone were the fights with the fax machine: paper jams, lack of toner, lack of paper, unsuccessful transmissions…the list is endless. The trouble with email is related to both the quality and the quantity of the messages received. How many of the emails received, resemble more electronic telephone conversations? How many emails glaringly show that the writer doesn’t know what they’re writing about? How many emails might have been saved with a simple phone call? The consequence is that even though you might be in the comfort of your home, you still have to spend hours reading through or replying to tons of mail.

How can work – from home or in the office – be made more effective? Surfing the web, you read a lot about the ‘end of email’. Some of the alternatives mentioned are things like blogs, social networks, instant messaging and so on. The question is though: will any of these or some other platform make communication better and more efficient? Or will we just have more platforms with which to produce ever greater quantities of nonsense? Or do we need to be even more flexible by quickly processing information from multiple sources?

Do you know of any communication platforms which could really make us more productive? Would love to hear from you.

I was at an airport café, waiting for boarding. As always I welcomed this break as it gave me time for checking my emails and completing some tasks. And I was not alone: Several people occupied the tables with their tablets (PCs that is), smartphones and notebooks at hand. It was a laid back but concentrated atmosphere. A modern cacophony of dishes rattling, coffee machines steaming and the clicking and doodling sounds of our electronic companions. When I sipped my coffee and watched the people around me, I realized that I was partaking in a historical change (at least for me). Just think back some years – this scenario would have been unimaginable.

We grew up with the paradigm that “work” was tied to a certain place and time. Office workers were chained to their desks from nine to five. Although there are still many areas where time and place are essential (think of nurses, pilots, fire-fighters or chefs) but for office workers there is a whole new freedom now. Where does it come from? In case you worry that you have missed a revolution, there wasn’t one. What happened was a rather imperceptible change driven by cloud computing technology. This is state of the art by now, with more and more smartphones, tablets and unlimited broadband access. The applications known from private life are going to change business life as well. What I saw at the airport has been confirmed by a recent study of Berlecon  which found the following: In every fifth enterprise, more than 50 percent of the staff is working mobile (i.e. outside the enterprise) more than once a week. And in every third enterprise people are working mobile within the building.

The mobile access to business related data is essential for a growing number of employees. And of course, more and more powerful tablet computers will come with smart virtualization technology that enables full access to all enterprise solutions a knowledge worker needs. This changes the whole enterprise culture. The office-centric concepts – where only those employees were believed to work hard, who were physically present during office hours – makes way for a productivity-oriented behaviour. It does not matter where and when you are working as long as you do your job in a timely manner and with good results.

In the long run, the cloud computing revolution will develop even further. Think of the skilled worker shortage. When your enterprise is located, let’s say in the Northern part of Germany and you found a talented new employee who lives in the Southern part – well, up to now this means he has to move in order to take the job, and usually this means a dramatic change in his private life he might not want to take. So why not let him work from his home? It is no problem to connect him to everything he needs for fulfilling his task via modern technology solutions. It does not matter if he works in his study, in a café or at a customer location as long as he does his job reliably and well. He might also share an office with other mobile workers, thus sharing infrastructure and benefiting from social interaction and a routine of a day.

But what about the nurses, the fire-fighters and chefs? Why not improve their administration tools as well? Why should the chef not be able to create his new menu and order the ingredients with his tablet on a park bench? Why should the head-nurse not be able to make the service schedule with a tool that considers everybody’s wishes automatically?

If you as a manager are accustomed to have your employees around you might fear to lose control if you lose sight of them. But recent studies show that flexible and mobile work styles actually increase a company’s productivity. So with the cloud revolution we might also have to revolutionize our thinking from “Trust is good, control is better” to the reverse. But that is another story.

Yours sincerely,

Andre Kiehne

Watching my wife enthusiastically click through the innumerable models of footwear the wordwide web has to offer, I came to think that IT administrators around the world will soon be able to enjoy a similar pastime. Of course it will have nothing to do with shoes, although some parallels do exist, as you will see. I am talking about the Fujitsu Business Solutions Store. Though the official launch will be later this year you can already click and see what it looks like – and of course, you are free to do some ‘solutions-shopping’.

The Business Solutions Store is a transparent on-line marketplace where companies can easily find solutions optimally suited to achieving their goals – like the perfect pair of shoes. The decision is facilitated by rating and evaluation systems. Just as shoe stores offer footwear suitable for all weather conditions, all occasions and sizes, the Business Solutions Store provides all kinds of software for companies of all sizes – for the long run as well as for temporary use. The solutions are accessible for everyone and available on demand. Best of all – once the optimum solution has been identified, it is ready to use immediately. This is where I see the difference to shoe shopping. You do not have to wait impatiently until the postman delivers your package or worry whether it will arrive in time.

Getting your solution via the Business Solutions Store cloud means no migration plans, no endless sets of test runs, no database configurations, no licence management, etc. Think that sounds like wishful thinking? Then you are going to be surprised by how concrete our plans have already become. We have received an overwhelmingly positive response from software firms. Since our internal “Forum” fair in November 2011, we have rapidly gained critical mass with over 500 interested companies, and there are already more than 70 cloud-enabled services within the store – and it’s steadily becoming more. The ISVs recognized right away that the Business Solutions Store will be the cloud model of the future, offering revenue-sharing opportunities and enabling them to reach a wider base of customers in new markets. What software houses find most attractive is the ease of transition, plus the way we have removed the cost and risk barriers. Maybe that is the secret of our successful start: since Fujitsu is not tied down by legacy software-licensing models, we are able to move really fast. There is virtually nothing holding us back.

So within four months of announcing the Business Solutions Store, it is available for every software vendor to join. Let’s hope that solution buyers will find the Business Solutions Store as attractive as some women find shoe stores (sorry for serving prejudices. I admit that I myself already bought some pairs of shoes online and spent an awful lot of time browsing).

Yours sincerely,

Andre Kiehne