Software for Hardware Demonstrations?

raarky asks: "My company will be running a stand at a rather respectable geek conference and I would like to ask the developer and sysadmin crowd what sort of demonstration software would be cool to see running on some of the highend server, workstation and mobility (notebooks, handhelds etc) hardware we have available. Ideally it has to appeal to the intended audience and show off the capabilities of these systems (read: intensive). My first thoughts were something like a renderfarm or some great open source 'end to end solution' that crunches lots of data and has client software to display the results." What software would you use to show off hardware capabilities?

renderfarms too slow

[FrenZon]

I wouldn't go with a renderfarm - people are too used to seeing the 60fps stuff that comes out of hardware acceleration to be THAT impressed by software rendering, even if it looks great at 1 frame every 10 seconds.

The same applies for most 'data crunching' applications - unless your audience is intimately familiar with how long ( protein folding | SETI searches | whatever you're doing ) takes, it's not going to be that impressive. Even if they do know how long something takes, a speed gain of two over whatever they use is just going to be lost in the hurly burly of the presentation atmosphere, unless you can compare them side-by-side.

That said, it's going to depend on your audience - if they are ALL real 3DSMAX heads, then show one of the default benchmarks running, with nice big printed charts showing the gains over your competition. But if they're a mix of 3DSMAX users and Maya users (for example), then you're going to lose half of them.

Hooray for unfinished comments!

Something fake

[duffbeer703]

You don't want your pcs to break during a demo.

Flashy and without substance is what a demo should be.

Do not demo software unless you sell software.

[Bishop]

You do not need software to demo hardware. Chances are that the demo software that you use will apeal to the wrong audience. Worst, you will spend more time answering software questions then hardware questions. Make the hardware look cool. Show the guts. If your servers have redundant bits, demo that.

The only software that you will need is operating systems. Sysadmins will want to know if the hardware runs their operating system of choice. If you only support Windows, only demo Windows. If your company is OS agnostic have several OSes installed, possibly in multiboot configurations.