Deliver GPU-Accelerated Virtual Workstations from the Data Center

It’s that time of year again!  April 4th kicks off NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose California.  If you’ve never heard of GTC or wonder what goes on at a “Graphics Conference”, you might be surprised by the breadth of technology and solutions that surround this event.  With everything from self-driving cars, gaming, deep learning/machine learning, and artificial intelligence, there is no shortage of exciting and cutting-edge technologies on display.

Deep Learning

For the 3rd consecutive year, Cisco will be present at GTC.  Wondering what Cisco has to do with deep learning?  A lot more than you might think!  Hugo Latapie, Cisco Principal Engineer, will be presenting a session on Deep Learning at the Edge of the Network. Check it out and stop by our booth to talk to Hugo about the cool things Cisco is doing in this area.

Virtualizing Graphics-Intensive Applications

To meet the demand for business agility, companies are turning to virtual workstations to increase flexibility for their workforce and accelerate business transformation. This is happening across a wide range of industries. Take the Corona-Norco Unified School District for example. It is replacing physical computer labs with virtual workstations that can be delivered to students anywhere, any time on less expensive end devices.

Cisco also works with application vendors to deliver validated solutions for deploying highly specialized 3D applications virtually. We have solutions for the PTC Creo Suite (Manufacturing) and Esri ArcGIS Pro (geospatial mapping) among others.  By the way, we will be showing a virtualized deployment of Arc GIS Pro in our booth and John Meza from Esri will talk about how they implemented their virtual development environment in a session on Tuesday.

Cisco UCS and NVIDIA GRID

Cisco offers a complete infrastructure solution that provides an exceptional graphics experience for delivering virtual applications and desktops. It is based
on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) platform and NVIDIA GRID technology. New to our product line this year are NVIDIA GRID 2.0 products; especially the new TESLA M6 MXM GPU which brings graphics acceleration to our VDI workhorse the UCS B200 M4 blade server. This provides UCS customers a wide range of configurations to support any VDI deployment needs they may have. And for customers who need a dense GPU configuration we support the Magma ExpressBox 3600-AB on our UCS C240 M4 rack servers for VDI deployments. And further extending our relationship with Magma we added support for TESLA K80.  With up to 8 x TESLA K80 GPU on a single UCS C240 M4, the most demanding GPU compute problems are no match for Cisco UCS!  Make sure to stop by the Cisco booth to see, touch and learn more about our GPU support for VDI and Compute solutions and speak with our experts.

Stop by Cisco Booth 304 at GTC

We are also pleased to host our partner, Citrix, in our booth. Citrix will demonstrate the latest remote graphics solution powered by Cisco and NVIDIA. Come experience the power of Citrix HDX 3D PRO running on the flexible Cisco UCS platform. This demo will cover HDX 3D Pro user experience, Citrix HDX Framehawk with GPU support and HDX USB device redirection to support additional USB drawing tools used by professionals.

We will also be showing our new Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution in the booth. Cisco HyperFlex is the first end to end HCI solution that combines compute, networking and next generation storage.

So come see us at booth 304 to discuss how we can power your applications with GPU-enabled Cisco UCS and attend our sessions on virtual workstations and deep learning on Tuesday April 5th at 3:00 PM and 4:30 PM respectively.

This blog was written in collaboration with Shawn Kaiser, Solution Architect at Cisco