Nvidia GPU Appliance Cuts Render from Hours to Minutes

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Graphics hardware supplier Nvidia announced at SIGGRAPH 2014 the immediate availability of their Nvidia Visual Computing Appliance (VCA). The Nvidia VCA is the company's network attached GPU accelerated rendering appliance designed to make ultra high performance rendering power available over a network to multiple client workstations.
Under Nvidia's remote graphics architecture the VCA handles all of the rendering while the client is used to deliver the display and user input information over the network. This architecture has the advantage of co-locating the processing power and the graphics data so the time consuming task of copying very large files to a graphics workstation is eliminated.
The Nvidia VCA features 8 Nvidia high-end GPUs each with:

• 12GB of RAM per GPU,
• 23,040 CUDA cores,
• 256 GB of system memory,
• an Intel Xeon E5 CPU running at 2.8 GHz,
• 2TB of SSD storage in a 4U enclosure with 2 1GigE, 2 10GigE, and 1 Infiniband network interfaces.

The Linux CentOS-based VCA's computing power coupled with supported rendering software, either Nvidia IRay or Chaos Group V-Ray RT, promise to enhance graphics workflow, allowing designers to see photo-realistic imagery rendered in speeds up to real time. Nvidia is working closely with software vendors to allow the VCA to work with industry standard software such as Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, McNeel Rhino, Dassault Systemes 3DXCite Bunkspeed and Sketchup.