DaNGeROuS KiLLeR Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 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. NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance As an example of the system's capabilities, Nvidia mentions French automaker Renault. Using the VCA and IRay, Maya designers were able to do real time visualization of the car designs for executive review. Another example was of a filmmaker who was able to cut down rendering time of a 4k stereo frame from 9.5 hours to 14 minutes using Chaos V-Ray RT on the VCA. The included VCA Manger software allows the system administrator to manage VCA users and their access to computing resources of the VCA, called VCA pools. Different users can be granted differing levels of access to the VCA's resources. Through a browser-based interface, a VCA user can reserve and release VCA pools. Individual VCAs can be disabled by an administrator if problems arise, allowing VCA pool availability to continue undisturbed. The Nvidia Visual Computing Appliance is available immediately in the US through IGI and GPL Technologies. 1
Recommended Posts