Bangalore, September 26 2013: Five years after he gave a clarion call to begin a new era of visual computing, NVIDIA co-founder and Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang is nudging enterprises to go the next step and take graphics to the cloud. From gaming to 3-D design to animation and FX, graphics-heavy visual computing has hitherto required heavy iron computing muscle on the desktop. But with desktops themselves becoming increasingly becoming virtual, the time has come to relieve computing platforms from having to host graphics-heavy applications, when these can be hosted on cloud servers, suggested Jen-Hsun, here, yesterday, unveiling NVIDIA's offering to make this happen -- the NVIDIA Grid.
The company which created the world's first Graphical Processing Unit, has unveiled what it call the industry's first hardware virtual GPU. The NVIDIA Grid solution comprisesNVIDIA GRID VGX software -- a complete stack of GPU virtualization, remoting and management libraries -- and purpose-built NVIDIA GRID K1 and K2 boards, for server environments.
For the first time, multiple virtual machines can directly access the graphics processing power of a single GPU. Jen-Hsun added, bringing in engineers from Adobe and Autodesk to demonstrate how computing resource-intense apps like PhotoShop or AutoCAD could run on extremely thin client machines like laptops and tablets.
"In a sense, this will allow Indian developers to leapfrog into the big league of visual computing, erasing any limitation of processing power in thousands of design houses". The NVIDIA Grid is particularly relevant in India that have been fast to adopt desktop virtualization and where companies rely on geographically dispersed teams that can take advantage of the work efficiency, data consolidation and IT security that a virtual desktop can provide.
He also suggested that the NVIDIA Grid would encourage trends like BYOD -- Bring Your Own Device -- where India is known to be a leader, second only to China.
NVIDIA's India Managing Director Vishal Dhupar added that the company's development centres in this country had joined in the realization of the Grid. In early years, NVIDIA's Bangalore-based developers had been key to the rollout of the GeForce 9400M single chip graphics solution, WhileGeForce 6100 was completely designed and developed in Hyderabad.
NVIDIA Grid is geared to appeal to architects, engineers and contractors using computer-aided design (CAD) tools, like Autodesk; manufacturing businesses that want to automate the connection between product design and operations using PLM tools, like Enovia 3DLive, PTC Windchill PLM Connector and SIEMENS Teamcenter software; digital-content creation workers using video and photo editing tools, like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and similar software; health-care specialists using picture archiving and communication system (PACS) applications, like GE Centricity EMR.
Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM are offering NVIDIA GRID-based servers. Recent announcements such as the IBM Flex, HP WS460c Gen8 and Fujitsu Celsius R930 bring the total number of NVIDIA GRID-enabled server platforms to 25Citrix, Microsoft and VMware are offering NVIDIA GRID-enabled software. These solutions can deliver GPU-accelerated applications and desktops to engineers, designers, architects, product design teams and special-effects artists throughout India.
More on NVIDIA GRID : The portfolio – comprises hardware, software and appliances – delivering GPU acceleration from data centres to any user. It includes the NVIDIA GRID platform for enterprises; the NVIDIA GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) for small and medium-size businesses; and the NVIDIA GRID Cloud Gaming Platform for gaming-as-a-service companies.
Do see a short video on our home page on NVIDIA vGPU
Earlier NVIDIA stories this year :
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