Test-Driving NVIDIA's GRID GPU Cloud Computing Platform 29
MojoKid writes: "NVIDIA recently announced that it would offer a free 24-hour test drive of NVIDIA GRID to anyone who wanted to see what the technology could do. It turns out to be pretty impressive. NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that allows for hardware acceleration in a virtual environment. It's designed to run in concert with products from Citrix, VMWare, and Microsoft, and to address some of the weaknesses of these applications. The problem with many conventional Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDIs) is that they're often either too slow for advanced graphics work or unable to handle 3D workloads at all. Now, with GRID, NVIDIA is claiming that it can offer a vGPU passthrough solution that allows remote users to access a virtualized desktop environment built around a high-end CPU and GPU. The test systems the company is using for these 24-hour test drives all use a GRID K520. That's essentially two GK104 GPUs on a single PCB with 8GB of RAM. The TD program is still in beta, the deployment range is considerable, and the test drives themselves are configured for a 1366x768 display at 30 FPS and a maximum available bandwidth cap of 10Mbit."
Nice, but expensive (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't particularly new. It's nice tech, but each ~$2000 K1 board supports 4 users. 4. The K2 board supports 2 'power users'. (ref: NVIDIA data sheet: http://www.nvidia.com/content/... [nvidia.com] )
If I cram 4 K1 boards in a server, I can now support 16 virtual desktops with 3D acceleration for an $8k delta over and above the other expenses of VDI.
Unless you ABSOLUTELY MUST have VDI for 3D workloads, I can't see how this makes sense.