Nicola Sessions, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, NVIDIA
High performance computing (HPC) enables organizations to work more quickly and effectively than traditional compute platforms—but that might not be enough to succeed in today’s evolving digital marketplace. Mainstream HPC usage is transforming the modern workplace as organizations utilize individually deployed HPC clusters and composable infrastructures to increase IT speed and performance and help employees achieve higher levels of productivity. However, maintaining disparate and isolated systems can pose a significant challenge—such as preventing workloads from reaching optimal efficiency. By converging the muscle of HPC and virtualized environments, organizations can deliver a superior virtual graphics experience to any device in order to optimize workflows, scale cost-effectively, improve business outcomes, and speed to value.
NVIDIA® Virtual GPU (vGPU) technology is designed with agility and flexibility in mind to support billions of today’s computing devices to the virtualized data center. This enables IT to centralize data and applications, resulting in improved security, productivity, and simplified manageability for a number of remote employees rapidly accessing or sharing data and running demanding graphics applications. In fact, organizations saw a 20% improvement in workflow cycle time by implementing graphics virtualization solutions. NVIDIA vGPU technology is essential to powering virtual workflows, such as computer-aided design (CAD) or oil and gas exploration. Integrated with industry-leading HPC hardware from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)—including HPE BladeSystem and HPE Synergy which support over 70,000 users of high-performance virtualization, these solutions are key to delivering an unmatched graphics experience with HPC-level performance.
Where HPC Servers and NVIDIA vGPUs converge
HPE servers combined with NVIDIA vGPU technology are driving major advancements to IT environments in all sectors. Remote visualization enables IT departments to collocate their compute resources in the data center, either on-premises or in the cloud. By centralizing, organizations can deploy a common architecture and easily provision compute resources, which dramatically reduces operational expenses while ensuring seamless remote access to vast quantities of data.
Organizations stand to gain a great deal from virtualized environments:
- Productivity: Remote visualization drives increased productivity by permitting anytime, anywhere access to graphics-intensive models and data. This increases collaboration and sharing of ideas. Time spent moving data between remote workstations and the data center is eliminated, allowing employees to harness and share insights in real time.
- Expanded application access: Highly skilled professionals value a work-life balance, and the ability to work from disparate locations on a variety of connected devices allows organizations to retain employees by providing a flexible and constantly accessible work environment
- Manageability: By implementing remote visualization tools, IT departments can dramatically simplify their costs and maintenance efforts. This allocates resources to business-critical tasks such as load-balancing, enhanced monitoring capabilities, and greater control and management of applications.
- Optimal resource utilization: Virtualized environments with embedded GPUs allow IT to provide flexible and scalable resources with greater utilization efficiency, reduced capital costs, and reduced operational costs, all while making data more available and accessible, both locally and around the world.
- Security: Remote visualization allows organizations to keep their critical data secure in the data center by transferring only pixels of images over the network, thus making it much harder for hackers to gain access to sensitive data and IP.
Implementing a virtualized environment is becoming increasingly important to succeed. Organizations who invest in these groundbreaking technologies will have the opportunity to not only improve workplace productivity, but also to accelerate business growth and fuel innovation.
The tools for growth and innovation
HPE offers multiple server families that are integrated with NVIDIA vGPU software, coupled with NVIDIA® Tesla® GPUs to empower organizations with virtualized graphics acceleration. The NVIDIA vGPU software portfolio includes NVIDIA GRID™ Virtual PC (vPC) and Virtual Apps (vApps) for employees using office productivity applications, as well as NVIDIA Quadro® Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS) for creative and technical professionals. NVIDIA vGPU software prepares organizations to harness the full power and efficiency of a virtualized environment. When employees log into their virtual machines, the NVIDIA driver sends a command to the vGPU engine, which schedules an action for the physical GPU. The result is then transmitted to the virtual machine within nanoseconds.
Graphics accelerators, such as NVIDIA vGPU technology, deliver an immersive, high-quality graphics experience for all users. Leveraging this graphics-accelerated cloud solution to centralize compute, applications, and data, organizations can operate with confidence knowing their virtual workspaces are secure, high-performing, and cost-efficient.
According to the July 2017 Tolly Test Report commissioned by HPE, the HPE BladeSystem provides high data center user densities when integrated with NVIDIA Tesla M6 and NVIDIA vGPU technologies. These powerhouse solutions support up to 12 CAD users per one rack unit of space, while ensuring optimal utilization of GPU resources. HPE Synergy leads the industry by supporting 19.2 users per 1 rack unit. Additionally, the HPE ProLiant WS 460c Gen9 graphics blade server for HPE BladeSystem is integrated with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to provide high-performance virtualization of graphics functions, thus positioning VDI as a valuable solution for organizations looking to deliver a graphics-rich experience. The benefits include faster model loads over high-speed data center networks, greater resiliency, improved business agility, and enhanced security as data remains protected in the data center.
To learn more about how virtualization is ramping up productivity and transforming workplace operations, and for more information on HPE servers and NVIDIA vGPU technologies that can make the difference, be sure to visit @HPE_HPC and @NVIDIAVirt.