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.

Earlier today, we saw NVIDIA present Volta, it’s next-generation GPU architecture that is designed to increase performance by addressing one of the “eternal” problems linked to GPUs more than any other processor type: memory bandwidth. Volta is going to use RAM that is layered on top of the GPU silicon to reduce energy consumption and latency during memory accesses. With this, NVIDIA says that it will be able to push 1 Terabytes of data per second through the chip. This is 5X superior to the GeForce Titan, which tops 192GB/s. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Valve Claims “No Involvement” With Xi3’s Piston, EA Apologizes For SimCity Snafu,

This week the folks at NVIDIA have been revealing bits and pieces of their GPU roadmap with Tegra and GeForce GPU action left and right, moving forward with their newest mobile superhero code-named SoC “Parker.” This SoC comes after the still code-named “Logan” and will, if the naming scheme holds true, be Tegra 6 down the road. Along with this reveal came word of a code-named system called “Kayla” – a processing beast that, when it’s ready for action, will be extra-tiny and extra-powerful beyond anything we’re capable of today.

Parker is the newest in a line of code-named Tegra processors, coming after Wayne (Tegra 4) and Logan (Tegra 5, more than likely), and bringing on the innovations of past generations and/or outdoing them with the following firsts:

• First with Denver CPU.
• First 64 bit ARM processor coupled with NVIDIA’s next-gen Maxwell GPU.
• First to use FinFET transistors.

According to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, this is only the beginning. Huang noted that “In five years time, we’ll increase Tegra by 100 times, though Moore’s Law would suggest an eight-fold increase.” With Logan we’ll see the first mobile processor on the planet to work with CUDA. This processor will also bring Kepler GPU power and OpenGL 4.3 – and it’ll be in production by early 2014.

Parker, on the other hand, is still in the pipeline. While we may see it out by 2015, we can’t be sure until NVIDIA gives the real word.

Then there’s Kayla. With NVIDIA’s Kayla, we’ve got what’s been described by Huang as “Logan’s girlfriend.” This device is around the size of a tablet PC at the moment, and is beastly enough already to run real-time ray tracing. As Huang said, “this is showing the kind of demos we used to do on massive GPUs.”

Inside Kayla you’ll find CUDA 5, Linux, and PhysX processing. All of this runs on a rather tiny ARM-toting computer – and it’s coming sooner than later. Have a peek at the timeline below for more Tegra and GeForce GTX action from NVIDIA as GTC 2013 continues – hit up our tag portal for more action as well, we’ll be here the whole conference long!

And don’t forget to check our massive Tegra hub for more mobile processing action than you can handle – more big blasts coming up quick!

NVIDIA Tegra “Parker” blasts forth aside mini ARM computer “Kayla” is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang spoke about the ever-growing GPU-utilizing universe, in both the mobile and desktop computer global environments. According to Huang, there will be more than 400 sessions at GTC. “This is the Mecca for scientific discovery”, said Huang of GTC 2013, “Nothing’s more important than the research being done on GPU computers.”

Huang ran through massive amounts of GPU-friendly happenings and upcoming events, including bits and pieces like the following:

• A 50 Gigapixel Camera being developed at the U of Arizona.
• GPU-accelerated diamond cutting.
• CUDA utilization for dating site matching compatibility.
• Oak Ridge’s Titan Supercomputing using 40 million CUDA processors together for 10 petaflops of power.
• Swiss Supercomputing Center starting construction on Europe’s fastest GPU Supercomputing Center Piz Dant – made for weather forecasting purposes.

According to Huang, GPU supercomputing is taking hold at an undeniably quick rate.

“If we’re not at the tipping point for GPU Computing, we’re racing at it. There’s a huge spike in GPU-based computers being built for real work – about 20 percent of total Top500 horsepower is GPU. Included in this is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer.” – Huang

Read more about Titan in our most recent update on the machine and know this – SlashGear’s experience with the GeForce GTX home-ready GPU is coming up quick, too – stay tuned! Of course you’ll also want to stick out the full conference with us here on SlashGear as we cover the entirety of the show, front to back. Have a look at our GTC 2013 tag for more information and stay tuned for more amazing rendering beastliness!

NVIDIA CEO races toward GPU Computing “tipping point” at GTC 2013 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Here live at GTC 2013 Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA took the stage for the opening keynote, and quickly got things started off by jumping right in with the GTX Titan. Obviously NVIDIA is extremely proud of the brand new single-GPU powerhouse, and we’re expecting plenty of details to quickly follow.

NVIDIA’s CEO already is talking about what we can expect to see this year at GTC, and the opening keynote will have 5 main things you can all look forward too. One, we’ll hear plenty about the breakthrough in “supercomputing” we’ve never seen before. As well as all the breakthrough’s this year has already given us.

We’ll get a broad update on GPU computing as a whole, how it’s progressing, and where it’s headed. Then what I’m sure many of you are waiting for is the NVIDIA Roadmap. Then last but not least NVIDIA will have a new product announcement. That will be last, so stay tuned for all the details.

While on stage Jen-Hsun Huang stated they didn’t know what to call their new GTX GeForce graphics card that you see above. After realizing it was more than just a GPU, but a GPU that truly brings supercomputing to our homes, they settled on the GTX Titan — and we think that’s fitting. Stay tuned folks.

NVIDIA: GTX Titan is a supercomputer in your home is written by Cory Gunther & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.