Businesses across India can now deploy graphics-accelerated virtual desktops for their employees. And this, they will be able to do cost-effectively anywhere, across platforms and on any device with the adoption of NVIDIA's Grid technology.
Servers from IT majors like Dell, Cisco, HP and IBM have started incorporating NVDIA's Grid into their desktop virtualisation solutions. Combined with enterprise virtualisation software from Centrix, Microsoft or VMware, these solutions can deliver GPU-accelerated applications and desktops to engineers, designers, architects, product design teams, and special effects artists throughout India.
This announcement was made here on Wednesday by NVIDIA's co-founder, president and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang.
What this essentially means is that the Grid technology will enable employees to use their own notebooks and portable devices to access all their office productivity and design applications virtually — just as they would at their desks, as long as they are connected through the Internet.
All these days, desktop virtualisation technologies were limited by performance and compatibility constraints that acutely compromised applications for building information management, product lifecycle management, and video editing.
“India is important to NVIDIA. A fifth of our engineers worldwide are based in India across design centres in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. The Bangalore Design Centre is the only centre outside of our headquarters in Santa Clara that works on end-to end of the design cycle. We’re truly a global design hub, in that all of the work that’s undertaken in NVIDIA has significant contribution from India,” said Huang said.
“NVIDIA has always believed that visual computing is the future,” he reiterated. “Today, we’re here to enable Enterprise Virtualisation 2.0.” Today’s enterprise scenario is characterised by two emerging trends: an increasingly mobile workforce, seeking the flexibility to work anywhere and anytime and a heterogeneous computing environment, with the proliferation of a wide variety of devices and operating systems.
In this context, it has been NVIDIA’s endeavour to equip today’s mobile workforce with better access to information and apps that typically reside in central data-centres, while bettering performance, Huang said.
“Instead of moving data into the hands of today’s mobile workforce, NVIDIA has brought computing to the data centres,” the NVIDIA founder said. He also acknowledged that it had taken an entire industry to perfect and deliver this technology into the hands of Indian enterprises. And, befitting the occasion, NVIDIA’s ecosystem partners including Adobe, Autodesk, HP, Dell, Citrix and VMware were part of the conference, as various applications running on a virtual desktop were demonstrated. Incidentally, NVIDIA has about 1,700 employees in India.
“Autodesk constantly looks for new ways to help companies of all sizes, creative visionaries and consumers to imagine, create and design a better world. Our users are some of the most talented artists and engineers you’d find,” said Pradeep Nair, managing director of Autodesk India and SAARC. “With NVIDIA Grid, our customers can get the rich visual Autodesk experience, essentially anywhere.”
* Graphics technology: NVIDIA invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from smartphones and tablets to notebooks and workstations.
* GPU computing offers unprecedented application performance by offloading compute-intensive portions of the application to the GPU, while the remainder of the code still runs on the CPU. From a user's perspective, applications simply run significantly faster.
