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nVidia Visual Computing Appliance looks promising.
I went to the nVidia booth to visit with Juan Salvo and ended up staying for over thirty minutes looking at the VCA. Very promising idea that can breathe new life into my older computers and make me rethink my future workstation purchases. Basically this machine would be the muscle behind any computer so I could theoretically buy very basic workstations for all the rooms.
Hoping to get a test unit in the shop at some point so we can see if this works in the “real world” but I definitely like this concept, especially for a multi seat shop like mine. With CS Next multi GPU aware, this could be huge for the Adobe suite of products.
https://www.nvidia.com/object/visual-computing-appliance.html
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
11 Replies
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Looks like it ties right in with Anywhere as well, no?
Alex
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[Alex Udell] “Looks like it ties right in with Anywhere as well, no?”
Looks like it’s going to tie in with Team Cloud subscriptions based on what they told me in the booth. I’m going to be meeting with the Atlanta nVidia rep in the near future to really figure out exactly what the box does and does NOT do in the workflow.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
This is most interesting, Walter. Although I’m a PC guy (I’ve worked with Macs in the past, and currently do work for clients who are Mac-based), I could see this as the solution for the long-time drought in the Mac world, waiting for the new Mac Pro. Is it possible that this device might hook in to a Mac laptop, thus giving it the guts to push pixels around at higher levels of resolution? Looks as if NAB 2013 has brought some ground-breaking technologies and improvements to the production world…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Joseph W. Bourke] “Is it possible that this device might hook in to a Mac laptop, thus giving it the guts to push pixels around at higher levels of resolution? Looks as if NAB 2013 has brought some ground-breaking technologies and improvements to the production world…”
It absolutely does, they were showing 3Ds Max running on a MacBook Pro. And Adobe Suite running on a Linus laptop.
That’s the concept. Underpowered computers can connect to this and suddenly be an enterprise workstation. You install a mini app on all your workstations to run the software from the nVidia VCA.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
[walter biscardi] “they were showing 3Ds Max running on a MacBook Pro.”
seriously – that actually works? they can provision the gpu there?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “seriously – that actually works? they can provision the gpu there?”
Yep, that’s precisely the concept. Applications run on any computer through the VCA. If Apple would license OS X then we’d be able to run Mac only products through the box as well.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
Is it giving you a virtual Win/Lin desktop or Application in a window?
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX -
[walter biscardi] “I’m going to be meeting with the Atlanta nVidia rep in the near future to really figure out exactly what the box does and does NOT do in the workflow.”
No multi-monitor support, and 1920×1200 max resolution. Other than that, working with one is the same as having a remote session into another computer that has Pr CS6 installed. Available memory may be another limitation – Tesla K20 has 5GB if I am not mistaken, and that’s all the memory you’ll get.
The biggest advantage I see is being able to open MacBook Air or even an iPad (anything, really), dial the VCA for a remote session and start editing with full GPU acceleration. It won’t replace desktops that are well configured for CS, not even iMacs.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Alex Gerulaitis] “Tesla K20 has 5GB if I am not mistaken, and that’s all the memory you’ll get.”
what’s than mean?
Alex
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I was wrong – the VCAs use Grid K2 cards (not Teslas), and each VM (virtual machine) is given 32GB RAM.
(Side note: I must have misheard and was under impression that the VMs would work directly on the GPUs and not host CPU(s); in retrospect, that was a silly thought. The VMs work on main CPU(s), with a GPU dedicated to each VM.
This may necessitate careful planning for heavy duty deployments with CPU-intensive tasks, as those are unlikely to benefit much from a VCA.)
The rest of the stuff is valid, i.e. each remote session is married directly to a specific GPU, although NVidia says that may change in the future, i.e. an 8-GPU VCA may support more than 8 users.
The concept is quite a bit different from Adobe Anywhere: VCA doesn’t require locally installed software other than a lightweight remote connection agent. Adobe Anywhere requires a full installation of the software on the client system, as far as I know. There’re other differences as well: VCAs exist in two fixed configurations; Adobe Anywhere – in a variety of them, on COTS servers with certain minimum requirements; VCAs are limited to dual 10GbE and an 8-lane PCIe slot for all connectivity and storage if I remember right; no such limitations with AA.
That said, VCAs are more flexible in some respects – they can run many apps that benefit from fast GPUs. AA – only (some) Adobe apps.
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