Hasta La Gadget!

This week at NVIDIA’s own GPU Technology Conference 2013, we’ve been introduced to no less than the company’s first end-to-end system: NVIDIA GRID VCA. The VCA part of the name stands for “Visual Computing Appliance”, and it’s part of the greater NVIDIA GRID family we were re-introduced to at CES 2013 earlier this year. This VCA is NVIDIA’s way of addressing those users – and SMBs (small-to-medium businesses) – out there that want a single web-accessible database without a massive rack of servers.

What is the NVIDIA GRID VCA?

The NVIDIA GRID VCA is a Visual Computing Appliance. In it’s current state, you’ll be working with a massive amount of graphics computing power no matter where you are, accessing this remote system over the web. As NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted on-stage at GTC 2013, “It’s as if you have your own personal PC under your desk” – but you’re in a completely different room.

You’re wireless, you’re in a completely different state – NVIDIA GRID VCA is basically whatever you need it to be. The first iteration of the NVIDIA GRID VCA will be packed as follows:

• 4U high.
• Sized to fit inside your standard server rack (if you wish).
• 2x highest-performance Xeon processors.
• 8x GRID GPU.
• 2x Kepler GPU.
• Support for 16 virtual machines.

You’ll be able to work with the NVIDIA GRID VCA system with basically any kind of computer, be it a Mac, a PC, mobile devices with Android, ARM or x86-toting machines, anything. With the NVIDIA GRID VCA, your remotely-hosted workspace shows up wherever you need it to. Each device you’ve got simply needs to download and run a single client going by the name “GRID client.” Imagine that.

If you’ve got a company using NVIDIA’s GRID, you’ll have access to mega-powerful computing on whatever machine you’ve got connected to it. One of the use-cases spoken about at GTC 2013 was some advanced video editing on-the-go.

Use Case 1: Autocad 3D and remote Video Editing

On-stage with NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang spoke James Fox, CEO of the group Dawnrunner. As a film and video production company (based in San Francisco, if you’d like to know), workers at Dawnrunner use Adobe software and Autodesk. As Fox notes, “Earth Shattering is what gets talked about in the office.”

Fox and his compatriots use their own GRID configuration to process video, head out to a remote spot and show a customer, and change the video on the spot if the customer does so wish it. While processing video of the monster sizes Dawnrunner works with, still needs relatively large computing power – “Hollywood big” we could call it – NVIDIA’s GRID can make it happen inside the NVIDIA GRID VCA.

With the processing going on inside the VCA and shown on a remote workstation environment (basically a real-time window into the GRID), you could potentially show real-time Hollywood movie-sized video editing from your Android phone. In that one image of a situation you’ve got the power of this new ecosystem.

Use Case 2: Hollywood Rendering with Octane Render

Of course no big claim with the word “Hollywood” in it is complete without some big-name movie examples to go with it. At GTC 2013, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang brought both Josh Trank and Jules Urbach onstage. The former is the director of the upcoming re-boot (2015) movie The Fantastic Four (yes, that Fantastic Four), and the latter is the founder and CEO of the company known as Otoy.

Both men speak of the power of GPUs, Trank speaking first about how people like he, the movie director, use CGI from the beginning of the creation of a film with pre-visualization to bid it out to studios, getting funding before there is any cash to be had. Meanwhile Urbach spoke of how CGI like this can be rendered 40-100 times faster with GPUs than CPUs – and with that speed you’ve got a lot less energy spent and far fewer hours used for a final product.

With that, Urbach showed Otoy’s Octane Render (not brand new as of today, but made ultra-powerful with NVIDIA GRID backing it up). This system exists on your computer as a tiny app and connects your computer to a remote workstation – that’s where NVIDIA’s GRID comes in – and you’ll be able to work with massive amounts of power wherever you go.

Octane Render allows you to use “hundreds or thousands” of GPUs to be used by renderers in the cloud. Shown on-stage was a pre-visualization of a scene from the original Transformers movies (which Otoy helped create), streamed in real time over the web from Los Angeles to the location of the conference: San Jose.

What they showed, it was made clear, is that the power of GPUs in this context cannot be denied. With the power of 112 GPUs at once, it was shown that a high-powered Hollywood-big scene could be rendered in a second where in the past it would have taken several hours. And here, once again, it can all be controlled remotely.

Cost

There are two main configurations at the moment for NVIDIA’s GRID VCA, the first working with 8 GPU units, 32GB of GPU Memory, 192 GB System Memory, 16 thread CPU, and up to 8 concurrent users. The second is as follows – and this is the beast:

GPU: 16 GPUs
GPU Memory: 64 GB
System Memory: 384 GB
CPU: 32 thread CPU
Number of users: up to 16 concurrent

If you’re aiming for the big beast of a model, you’re going to be paying $39,900 USD with a $4,800-a-year software license. If you’re all about the smaller of the two, you’ll be paying $24,900 USD with a $2400-a-year software license.

Sound like the pocket-change salvation you’ve been waiting for? Let us know if your SMB will be busting out with the NVIDIA GRID VCA immediately if not soon, and be sure to let us know how it goes, too!

SlashGear 101: Remote Computing with NVIDIA GRID VCA is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you remember your college days (or are currently experiencing them now), then you no doubt remember all of those collaboration projects that your professors made you work on. To help out, Microsoft is now offering college students three months of Office 365 University and 20GB of SkyDrive storage for free.

Office 365 University allows access on up to two computers per account, and it costs $79.99 for a four-year subscription. The bundle comes with all the necessary tools to get those assignments done, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. To take advantage of the free trial and get your free SkyDrive storage, all you have to do is enter in your .edu email address.

Plus, if you share the offer on Facebook, you’ll get an additional three months of free access, totaling six months of Office 365 without paying a dime. Of course, that’s only $10 you’re saving, but a penny saved is a penny earned. Of course, if you’re not a student, you can still try out Office 365 Home Premium free for one month as well.

Microsoft released a comical advertisement to promote the offer, which features Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza who plays deadpan character April Ludgate-Dwyer in the show. In the commercial, Plaza informs students about how easy it is to get your collaboration projects done using Office 365 University and SkyDrive in separate locations, officially negating the point of meeting up in the library.

Microsoft offering students 3 months of Office 365, 20GB SkyDrive storage for free is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Dell may have ditched its Android phone plans, but it’s still kicking Google’s OS around, with the new Dell Wyse Project Ophelia USB computer relying on Android to turn any display into a PC or cloud gaming system. Slightly larger than a memory stick, Project Ophelia plugs into the USB port on compatible TVs or monitors and boots into a customized cloud-centric interface, remotely accessing your Windows PC and allowing you to view and edit all of your usual files. However, Dell also suggests that it could make for a great personal cloud gaming system, echoing features from OnLive and NVIDIA’s new Project SHIELD.

Project Ophelia is the handiwork of Dell’s Cloud Client Computing Team – formerly the Dell Wyse team – and given the initial enterprise focus, as you’d expect there’s a good dollop of security in play. There’s support for Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware remote-computing platforms, and onboard Bluetooth and WiFi for connectivity; Bluetooth is used to hook up a wireless keyboard, mouse, gamepad, or other peripheral.

No external power supply is needed, with Project Ophelia getting all its juice from the USB port. Inside there’s Android 4.0, with preloaded web, social networking, and media playback support, as well as Android app support; it’s unclear if that includes Play market access.

Project Ophelia will be available in the first half of 2013, Dell says, though it hasn’t yet suggested pricing. One possibility is a deal with cloud access providers or companies with OnLive ambitions, who might rebadge the stick to suit their own service.

Dell Project Ophelia slaps Android in a USB computer for cloud-based joy is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has signed a $36 million deal with HP and Microsoft that will result in 600,000 users being migrated to Microsoft’s cloud email and collaboration services. The contract is for 5 years, and involves an initial amount of 15,000 employees being transitioned to Office 365 for Government. The rest of the staff will be transitioned over the rest of the contract’s duration.

In total, over 600,000 employees will be migrated to Microsoft’s cloud products. Office 365 will be used for nearly all computing activities, including conferences, email, instant messaging, calendar-related activities, as well as adding the use of SharePoint and Office collaboration items. Less the Veterans Department side exclusively with Microsoft, however, it tossed HP into the mix.

HP will provide disaster recovery and work as a systems integrator, according to Information Week. This comes after a deal the VA entered into with Microsoft this past summer that provided it with access to many of the company’s applications and services. Says Microsoft, the agency possesses one of the largest technology systems in the country.

The Department of Veterans Affairs employs 6,300 IT workers, and has over 100,000 mobile devices and 400,000 PCs, making it second only to the Department of Justice. The entire network is comprised of 800 clinics, 135 nursing homes, 163 hospitals, and more. What prompted the deal? Transitioning to cloud services is more cost effective than the current setup.

[via Information Week]

Department of Veterans Affairs signs $36m cloud-computing deal is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jolicloud has portrayed itself as a sort of one-stop shop for cloud services and web apps, where a single sign-in keeps us on top of everything. It’s mostly been limited to big-league content as a result, but that’s changing with the new Jolicloud Open Platform. Developers now just have to build JavaScript-based Node.js components that hook their own apps, media and storage into the same central Jolicloud repository we’d use to manage Instagram and Tumblr. More details and full documentation are forthcoming, although the “open” in Open Platform leads us to think there won’t be many technical (or financial) barriers to entry.

Filed under: Internet

Jolicloud Open Platform arrives, lets developers put most any cloud service into one hub originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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