How this powerful workstation helps high-tech jobs go remote

While the work-from-home revolution moved from being a trend to a necessity over the past few years, it’s created significant challenges for people in certain professions — such as film editors, video game designers, scientists, architects, and engineers — to take advantage of remote work like people in other jobs have. The computing and graphics-processing technology on the market just hasn’t been powerful enough to meet the productivity demands of those who are doing things like rendering graphics, testing game builds, or who need to view accurate color.

“How do you access the same level of computing power, securely and efficiently, so it feels like you are in the studio or office? Take someone doing VFX. They’re used to having multiple large displays on their desk and doing 6K media playback,” says Mark Hirst, the Workstation Solutions Manager at Lenovo. “But the problem is, when you try to send that many pixels over the network, it can require an awful lot of bandwidth, which if not available, can really impact the user experience.” When working remotely, it also makes it difficult for the user to get all of the desk real estate they’re used to having in the office. There’s often a lag when trying to move their mouse making it a less efficient, and often a frustrating way of working.

Enabling people to work remotely is as much about convenience as it is about improving the way we work. Hirst and his team aimed to reimagine workstations entirely and figure out how to get people employed in any industry access to powerful, responsive, and secure computing so they can work from anywhere, and work better from anywhere.

One of the solutions Lenovo offers is the powerful ThinkStation P620 utilizing Mechdyne’s TGX technology. Powered by AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors, the P620 paired with TGX remote workstation software enables the user to access incredible computing capability from their mobile workstation. Imagine working from a mountain cabin over Wi-Fi and accessing the same power, speed, and capabilities as a local workstation in the office — with no lag, no loss in quality, no huge bandwidth requirements, and no security concerns. It honestly sounds a little bit like magic.

To create this solution, Lenovo started with its ThinkStation P620 — a beast of a machine that was already the go-to pick for a top Hollywood animation studio. The P620 has the most powerful CPU in a single-socket, with 64 cores and 128 threads, and its up to four GPUs are capable of supporting four users on one machine. The latest AMD Threadripper PRO processor is 25 percent faster than anything else — outperforming even dual CPUs.

With this suite of tech already on board, the Lenovo team worked on improving the flexibility of the system by adding virtualization technologies that enable multiple users to connect and work simultaneously in the same workstation. The resulting virtualized workstation’s capabilities offer a cost-effective way to get very high performance compared to the alternative, a standard data center model. “We are giving a lot of the same advantages to what you get from a data center or the cloud, just on your own hardware,” Hirst says. Finally, there are the remote graphics capabilities. Hirst shares that he’s done demonstrations in Europe where he’s connecting back to systems 7,000 miles away through a mobile phone with a SIM card he just bought for $20, and it has worked seamlessly.

“When people get to experience the technology, it blows them away,” Hirst says of the response to the remote workstation’s high performance. “People can’t believe I’m not cheating when I pass the mouse; they think there is a workstation under the desk!”

Here’s how it works: There’s the sender, the ThinkStation P620, at a desk in the office. And then a receiver, either a laptop or mobile workstation. Both are equipped with a piece of software and all the user has to do is log in and work as usual. That’s it. The user moves their mouse, and it moves the mouse on the far side, and any additional latency is stripped out so that it feels local. The system uses hardware accelerations from both the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor and its GPU to accomplish the encoding and decoding of pixels. “We’re only sending encrypted pixels across the network and not moving any data, which gives us the ability to work remotely but only use a really small amount of network bandwidth — 15 to 20 mbps — which many people have at home,” Hirst says.

What does this look like in practice? Take people working in video editing. The compression techniques used with Lenovo’s Remote Workstation solution only require 25 mbps for a 4K display — a total game changer for those in the field. When needing to work with accurate color, pixel perfect color is non-negotiable. A common technique for streaming video is to further compress the video, essentially to dumb down the colors, which changes their appearance. With the Lenovo system, there’s no need to do that and accurate color can be achieved with minimal bandwidth. The system also enables collaboration in a unique way: A video editor, colorist, and post-production manager all scattered around the country can look at the same thing and make real-time changes through shared keyboard and mouse control. This enables quick changes and ultimately, a more efficient process where edits can be made in seconds.

In oil and gas, workers are using this technology for large-scale visualization rooms. It allows them to take the data from the systems they have set up all around the world and connect really big visuals together in one place in high resolution. Hirst has heard of use cases where people doing dangerous work on an offshore oil rig were connecting and interacting in real time with the geoscientists who were in a safer position on shore. Not only does this remote workstation solution enable people to work from anywhere, it helps them do their job in different and more effective ways.

The Lenovo Remote Workstation solution is transforming what’s possible in a single CPU workstation and offering a high-powered and seamless solution to a complicated technology problem. “With the extra flexibility and virtualization on such a high-powered workstation, it’s pretty unique in what it does,” Hirst says. “In the market, it stands alone.”