NVIDIA's GRID ushers in era of Graphics Accelerated Virtualization
From concept to test to deployment and release, the NVIDIA Pune R&D team has created the GRID tool end to end
By : anand parthasarathy
Update: 2014-11-04 13:41 GMT
Mumbai: Visual computing leader NVIDIA is all set to make advanced graphics-intensive computing a less expensive affair, with an offering that allows real-time rendering, modeling and simulation on the cloud. At VMware's vForum event in Mumbai last week, NVIDIA presented a demo of its GRID technology that allows designers and engineers to harness the power of the cloud by running graphics-rich applications on the cloud in real-time.
Powered by a new GPU created in collaboration with VMware, NVIDIA has essentially created a new VGX hypervisor which is embedded into VMware's own hypervisor, allowing seamless integration with VMware's virtualization engine. NVIDIA's tool is a brainchild of its Pune engineering team. From concept to test to deployment and release, the Pune team has created the GRID tool end to end.
What is path breaking here is the fact that the entire GPU is virtualized, and is accessed via the cloud, slashing maintenance costs dramatically. Also, the core processing may be done at a physical datacenter but is accessed via cloud on any device, not necessarily powered by an on-site graphics-capable hardware machine.
Speaking to IndiaTechOnline, Shridhar Garge, Head - Business Strategy & Operations, S. Asia for NVIDIA said, "The biggest roadblock for cloud adoption in the engineering and graphic design industry was the fear that the rendering would not be smooth, there would be jerks, and imaging quality would not be up to the mark. All this is a thing of the past now. NVIDIA's GRID technology based on VMware's virtualization methodology provides advanced engineering visual content on any display device, by syncing up real-time with apps residing on the cloud, saving massive investments in physical hardware."
Graphics virtualization as a service is also being provided by third party vendors like Amazon Web Services for a pay-per-use fee allows engineers to 'invoke' cloud compute power as and when they wish to. Speaking about how tools like GRID are an ideal use case for VMware's Software Defined Data Centre, Arun Kumar, Managing Director - India, VMware said, "This is a fine example of how our partners are leveraging the cloud to build software that runs just as well or even better than on traditional physical devices. The cost savings are massive, so much so that even industries like graphics engineering and banking services, which were -- by the nature of their work -- reluctant to move their core computing to the cloud, are now exploring it, and reaping multifold benefits."