Citrix and Nvidia accelerate desktop virtualization with virtual GPUs

Nvidia’s portfolio of hardware, software, and appliances has been focused of late on providing GPU acceleration within the data center. Until recently, the company’s general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) development was largely aimed at high-performance computing (HPC) environments. But now Nvidia is going after the much larger enterprise market with its new Grid GPU virtualization technology.

The company originally unveiled its Grid VCA appliance at the GPU Technology Conference in March to support its Grid VGX virtual desktop software. At the time, Nvidia said it was working with other hypervisor vendors to allow virtual machines to run directly on the GPU rather than on the CPU.

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During Citrix Synergy last week, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton joined with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang to announce that Citrix XenServer will be the first hypervisor to use this new technology. They also discussed how the newly announced Citrix XenDesktop 7 platform will be the first desktop virtualization solution capable of remotely accessing GPU resources using Nvidia’s Grid vGPU technology.

The announcement was perhaps the most talked about demonstration at the show — with good reason. This technology seems like an immediate game changer.

Nvidia Grid technology will let businesses enjoy the broad benefits of desktop virtualization — flexibility, manageability and security — while still delivering a full PC experience to end users without skimping on graphics performance. And by delivering fast 3D graphics capabilities to a virtual desktop from a hosted server in the data center, Nvidia may have touched on one of the key missing components of a VDI environment, also known as the VDI Holy Grail. It’s no wonder major hardware manufacturers like Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM have been lining up to provide servers powered by Nvidia Grid technology.

The new Grid vGPU also targets another challenge that has grown in recent years: BYOD. More and more employees are choosing to use their own laptops and portable devices for work, and they are relying on desktop virtualization for the anytime, anywhere access to their desktops. Unfortunately, until now desktop virtualization technologies have been limited to standard enterprise applications and could not provide support for graphics-intensive software.

But according to Citrix, tens of millions of knowledge workers can now benefit from graphics acceleration across any platform (Windows, Mac, or Android), using any device (desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones), on any application (OpenGL, DirectX, or GPGPU). As long as the device has a display and a Citrix receiver, Nvidia’s Grid vGPU “makes it work.”

Nvidia is offering a set of server products and graphics boards under the brand name Grid, which will allow the company to connect GPUs to the growing number of virtualization and cloud deployments. Nvidia currently produces two options: a dedicated GPU pass-through, which means a single VM would get access to a single GPU (a solution showcased at Citrix Synergy last year, but which doesn’t scale); and a new virtual GPU, which currently allows up to eight users to share a single physical GPU.

The company offers its Grid server cards in two models: the K1 and K2. The Nvidia Grid K1 graphics board has four lower-powered Kepler-based GPUs and 16GB of DDR3 memory, which can support up to 32 virtual machines simultaneously (servers typically support two boards, so it would support a total of 64 users per server). The K1 is designed to host the maximum number of concurrent users on a server. The Nvidia Grid K2 graphics board, on the other hand, comes with two higher-end Kepler GPUs and 8GB of GDDR5 memory and supports up to eight VMs. The K2 is designed to deliver maximum density for users of graphic-intensive applications. Nvidia said its next-generation chips will allow for larger frame buffers, which effectively means its next-generation cards will probably have even more GDDR5 memory.

According to the announcement, Citrix has incorporated HDX GPU sharing and deep compression techniques into its latest edition of XenDesktop 7, which will enable users to take advantage of the hosted-shared form of desktop virtualization to deliver rich, graphics-intensive applications. When combined with Microsoft Windows Server RDSH, it allows for true GPU virtualization to enable the sharing of GPUs across multiple user sessions.

“With Nvidia Grid vGPU, even the most intensive graphics applications can be delivered by XenDesktop 7,” said Bob Schultz, vice president and general manager of the Desktops and Applications Group at Citrix. “Now businesses can provide their users with the performance that they expect and need for engineering, design and video applications, while centrally securing and managing valuable intellectual property and sensitive information.”

Nvidia and Citrix said the following types of businesses and verticals could benefit from this type of virtualized desktop graphics capability: architects and engineers using computer-aided design (CAD) tools; businesses using PLM tools for manufacturing applications; digital-content creators using video and photo editing software; and health care specialists using picture archiving and communication system (PACS) applications.

M7 Global Partners, a consortium of the top nine Citrix platinum-level IT providers in the United States, has endorsed the Nvidia Grid vGPU technology. M7, which has customers of all sizes across a wide range of industries around the world, plans to deploy Grid technology on servers from all the major vendors. Nvidia revealed that 175 customer trials with Nvidia Grid are already well underway.

As of this writing, the vGPU multisharing technology is limited to the Citrix XenServer hypervisor. We can only assume that this GPU virtualization technology will be coming to VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V at some point in the future.

This article, “Citrix and Nvidia accelerate desktop virtualization with virtual GPUs,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.