Engineering and design workflows are evolving at an unprecedented pace. Previously isolated tasks, such as 2D drafting, CAD (computer-aided design), and one-dimensional simulations, are converging into integrated digital workflows: digital twins, real-time simulation, generative design, immersive visualization, and AI (artificial intelligence)-powered applications. To successfully handle these workflows, engineers need a platform that addresses the ever-increasing demands for more power performance, reliability, scalability, and higher productivity under ever-present time and cost pressures.
Image source: NorthStar Creations/stock.adobe.com.
The growth of integrated digital workflows has created a new set of challenges for engineering teams in industries such as automotive, aerospace, electronics, and other areas that have relied heavily on CAD and CAE (computer-aided engineering). Along with expanding capabilities of new technology, teams often face multiple, overlapping demands, such as:
Lenovo’s ThinkStation PGX with Lenovo’s P1, ready to work on the go. Image source Lenovo.
Lenovo’s ThinkStation PGX is accelerated by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, engineered for AI workflows, and seamlessly integrates into your existing workstation setup to increase compute capacity. Image source Lenovo.
All of these engineering demands elevate the need for superior hardware performance. Parameters such as memory, graphics processing units (GPUs), computing speeds, and input/output (I/O), are more important than ever in enabling engineering innovation. Shortcomings in any of these areas can create critical bottlenecks that throttle productivity and efficiency.
For example, workstations that support emerging AI and simulation workflows include the resources needed to handle generative design, digital twin development, and visualization in real time. Properly designed workstations can help users across the full AI lifecycle: from discovery through design development, then extending into deployment, optimization, and governance, as well as operations and maintenance.
In manufacturing and other modeling-focused industries, Lenovo workstations equipped with NVIDIA professional GPUs have proven well-suited for demanding workflows. Lenovo AI-ready workstations can unlock generative design, simulation of large datasets, and design automation. With NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, teams can create a full digital replica of their factory floor and use the digital twin to work out production problems before starting manufacturing, potentially saving significant time and money.
In particular, Lenovo’s newest workstation, the ThinkStation PGX, is engineered for AI-centric workflows. Equipped with 128GB of unified system memory and pre-configured with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and the full NVIDIA AI software stack, the combination offers substantial levels of computing power at the local workstation.
Powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, the PGX delivers up to 1 petaFLOPs of AI performance. A petaflop is equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second. The configuration can support AI models with up to 200-billion parameters. When two units are connected, the capacity increases to 405-billion parameters.
Despite its compact form factor, the ThinkStation PGX can be scaled through modular stacking on your desktop, increasing your server power. Image source Lenovo.
Much of the power of modern workstations has been realized by transferring computing from the central processing unit to the GPU, noted Dalibor Lingenfelder, Transportation and Manufacturing Industry Manager at Lenovo. This enables more intensive computing to be done on local desktop workstations, rather than in data centers. For engineering teams, this means local prototyping, fine-tuning, and inference with large generative models, directly on the desktop, without relying on data centers or cloud resources.
“In the past, many of these high-end engineering and visualization workflows were possible only in the datacenter,” said Lingenfelder. “But with the latest NVIDIA RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell GPUs, that performance is now available on a workstation under your desk. What once required server-class infrastructure can now be executed directly on a high-end GPU workstation.”
The ability to do more work on local workstations can also compress design cycles, according to Himanshu Iyer, Manufacturing Industry Marketing & Strategy Lead at NVIDIA. “When you want to use datacenter resources, you often have to wait in the queue,” Iyer said. “Having that power in your workstation means that you don’t have to wait. You can do significantly more design iterations and simulations.”
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Engineering professionals are achieving significant gains from modern workstations, in numerous industries. Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can leverage Lenovo ThinkStation P8 systems with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs to stream extended reality (XR) content and run high-fidelity simulation and visualization workflows for design reviews and digital twin development. This accelerated time-to-demo, improved stakeholder alignment and unlocked additional system orders.
Software developers, particularly those employing AI, are also harnessing the resources of GPU-based computing, noted Iyer. “The ISVs who develop these applications are transitioning from general purpose computing, which was CPU-based, to accelerated computing, which is GPU-based,” Iyer said. This has enabled simulation applications to run 10 to 50 times (or more) faster than previously, he noted.
For example, a research team can use the Lenovo ThinkStation PGX to fine-tune large AI models (e.g., generate design variants, optimize material layouts, or simulate manufacturing defects) locally, reducing reliance on cloud resources, enabling faster iteration and lowering cost.
Depix Technologies, Inc., a software company that uses AI to rapidly create images and videos, has seen firsthand how the right hardware streamlines its workflows. The company’s DesignLab software provides design and marketing professionals with concept creation and communication tools, while its ImageLab software focuses on editing and visualization.
When using Depix with a high-performance workstation, users can create and edit high-resolution images directly on the workstation without relying on a server. Image source Depix.
For Depix engineering and product teams, fast and efficient hardware performance enables rapid model development, benchmarking, and debugging. Robust hardware also provides critical infrastructure control and a stable environment for validating performance before deployment, factors that optimize development costs.
“Lenovo workstations with modern NVIDIA GPUs provide the local performance required for fast inference, stable model iteration, and latency-free generative design workflows,” said Christian Braun, Depix Chief Product Officer. “These systems give us the computational backbone we need for complex image processing, 3D transformations, fine-tuning, and real-time visual generation — all with full data privacy.”
For Depix end users, a high-performance Lenovo workstation enables fast image generation and experiment cycles, directly on the workstation without relying on a server. With enterprise-level reliability, users can explore new designs efficiently in long sessions and batch mode.
“With Lenovo workstations, Depix delivers real-time generative design and engineering on-device — faster, private, stable, and ready for both exploration and enterprise-scale deployment,” noted Braun.
Field engineers and simulation analysts can use Lenovo’s mobile workstations such as the P16 Gen3 equipped with the newest NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU and up to 192GB of system memory to run CAD/CAE tasks with large memory and GPU requirements, enabling global collaboration, on-site prototyping and hybrid workflows.
IMSCAD — a global services provider specializing in remote work for compute-intensive design applications — illustrates how Lenovo technology can extend workstation-class performance to distributed engineering teams. By deploying hosted Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra SFF, P7, and PX systems within Equinix data centers, IMSCAD delivers low-latency, GPU-accelerated virtual workstations that designers, engineers, and CAD users can access securely from anywhere.
This architecture removes virtualization overhead and provides direct access to CPU and GPU resources, enabling professionals to manipulate large CAD, BIM, and simulation models smoothly across continents. Engineering firms using IMSCAD’s Lenovo-powered environment report more responsive workflows, reduced IT burden, and lower long-term operating costs compared to cloud-only solutions, making advanced design performance available even when teams are fully remote.
IMSCAD hosts Lenovo ThinkStation P3, P7, and PX (pictured above) systems within datacenters allowing users to access virtual workstations from anywhere. Image source Lenovo.
The future of engineering is converging: CAD, simulation, AI, visualization, and digital twin development are no longer done in separate silos. Today’s workstation is the enabler of tomorrow’s product innovation. By investing in future-ready hardware, certified and scalable GPUs, engineering teams can accelerate iterations, unlock richer insights, and deliver products that meet increasing demands for safety, performance, and sustainability.
Another trend gaining momentum is the use of small language models for AI modeling. Instead of relying solely on public-domain large-language models, teams are turning to discipline-specific AI modeling. These small language models involve several hundred million parameters, instead of billions of parameters, meaning they can be trained much faster and with smaller computing resources, according to Iyer.
So as engineering workflows are converging, the potential for innovation is ever-expanding. Hardware advances from companies such as Lenovo and NVIDIA are enabling engineering and design teams to unlock the performance, scalability, and agility needed to keep pace with innovation. With the right resources, hardware can do more than just support your work — it propels it into the future.
As workflows continue to converge, the ability to run AI-accelerated simulation and design locally will redefine productivity and innovation across manufacturing, transportation, and product development.
FAQ:Why are CAD, CAE, simulation, and AI converging now?Because engineering tasks increasingly rely on shared data and real-time feedback. Unified workflows eliminate silos, accelerate iteration, and unlock advanced capabilities like digital twins and generative design. What hardware characteristics matter most for next-generation engineering workloads?GPU performance, unified memory capacity, I/O bandwidth, and ISV-certified configurations have the largest impact. These factors determine how efficiently teams can run simulation, visualization, and AI workloads locally. How does the Lenovo ThinkStation PGX support AI and simulation workflows?It combines 128GB of unified system memory with NVIDIA’s full AI software stack and the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, enabling up to 1 petaFLOP of AI performance on the desktop. Can engineers develop or fine-tune AI models locally, without cloud services?Yes. With GPU-accelerated workstations such as the PGX, teams can run inference, fine-tune large models, generate design variants, or test simulation data directly on the desktop — reducing cloud dependency and iteration time. What industries benefit most from GPU-accelerated engineering workstations? Automotive, aerospace, electronics, and advanced manufacturing rely heavily on multi-physics simulation, digital twins, and visualization. These sectors gain measurable speed and productivity improvements from workstation-based accelerated computing. Why are small language models relevant to engineering teams?Smaller, discipline-specific AI models train faster, require fewer resources, and can be deployed locally — ideal for organizations that need domain-specific intelligence without massive cloud infrastructure. |
This article was written in collaboration with Lenovo and NVIDIA.
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