Spanning Physical Boundaries of GPU Computing with Kepler
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has revealed the cloud capabilities of its newly launched Kepler GPU. He also introduces a slew of hardware and software services built around this capability, effectively building high-performance computing ecosystems with the intention to democratize this technology.
Kepler Virtualized and Ready for Cloud Computing
Leveraging on the buzz and excitement of his opening keynote address at GTC 2012, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed the full capabilities of the Kepler GPU. He also spoke in length about NVIDIA's plan to put Kepler in the clouds, by enabling the parallel computing prowess of the Kepler GPU to be distributed over cloud computing services.
NVIDIA CEO Huang was practically walking on cloud nine as he spoke about the cloud computing capabilities of the Kepler GPU during his keynote address at GTC 2012.
Although we have briefly touched on the features of Kepler during the launch of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680; however, it did dawn upon us that Kepler was meant for bigger things. CEO Huang did reveal more features of the Kepler architecture by positioning it as the world's first virtualized GPU.
With its Virtualized GPU technology, the physical command buffers have been virtualised. Each graphics command that the buffer receives goes through a MMU (memory management unit) lookup and does a virtual physical-to-virtual address translation. This enables the GPU to ascertain which virtual machine has sent the graphics command. The shared Kepler GPU is able to render the command into the frame buffer of that specific virtual machine and send it back accordingly.
By breaking down the traditional dedicated relationship of a GPU and a user with its Virtualized GPU technology, NVIDIA has readied Kepler GPU to be deployed to cloud computing and its related services.
NVIDIA VGX Technology in Action
After warming up the audience, CEO Huang proceeded to introduce NVIDIA VGX, in his own words, "...a technology that virtualizes the computing environment such that irrespective of your computing device, we can provide access to the corporate technologies and data that you need.". With the touted energy efficiency of Kepler as well as its Virtualised GPU capabilities, NVIDIA ultimately hopes to see the adoption of its VGX technology into data centers where users of differing computing requirements can conveniently access the computing powers of the shared Kepler GPUs from any device of their choice. One manner to deliver this technology would be the use of a universal Citrix end-user application, that when executed, will deliver a 'dedicated' virtual CPU-GPU stack to the user's device that is effectively tethered to a shared Kepler GPU.
In collaboration with Citrix, NVIDIA has enabled VGX to work with the former's VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) technology, effectively boasting the capabilities of VDI with Kepler's parallel computing prowess over a distributed network environment.
In order to show how scalable the GPU-Accelerated VDI environment is, the video wall showed 100 individual desktops in a Citrix VDI setup that is powered by a single server tucked at the bottom of the screen.
In this demonstration, Grady Cofer, the visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, used a Macbook Air to remotely access their Nuke, a rendering application hosted at ILM's server farm to make changes to a scene from the movie "The Avengers".
There was a live demonstration of GeForce GRID in collaboration with cloud computing services company, Gaikai. The demonstration was carried out with two players slugging it out in an unreleased first-person mecha shooter titled "Hawken".
The beautifully rendered cockpit of a mecha in the yet-to-be-released game "Hawken". It was revealed that Gaikai is in talks with Samsung as a cloud gaming service provider for Samsung's cloud gaming services that will be launched with its Smart TVs in the near future.
With such varied applications of the cloud computing capabilities of the Kepler GPU, NVIDIA seems true to its word when the company said that it wanted to throw its weight behind GPU computing and take it to new heights by democratizing the technology by making it convenient for anyone, regardless of their computing requirements and constraints. It is truly the empowerment of people, computing power to the people.
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