How is CAD different to gaming apps? Apples and Pears!

I’ve recently written a couple of blogs on why professional graphics cards offer enterprise users value. Evan Yares (yes – the famous one) commented on my post and asked me this question. Evan I suspect already knows the answer as he was the first CAD analyst I saw write about the GPU virtualization projects associated with the GRID products I work on (back in 2013). “No More CAD Workstations”. The fact Evan jumped on it on the day of release makes me think he sees value in professional graphics development 😀

The value for enterprise in professional graphics above consumer gaming cards (GPUs)

I recently wrote a blog in response to a CAD blog highlighting the value in professional graphics cards over consumer gaming cards. In particular I tried to communicate how the software and drivers associated with these cards are a mainstay of the product you get; along with the investment in ensuring they are optimized, tested, certified for demanding applications such as Catia, Solidworks, etc. I felt I should have included more details of what you get with a professional graphics card such as our NVIDIA Quadro or GRID products. There is an awful lot of testing, development and support to staff with these products but I feel that is actually reflected in the end product.

Esri ArcGIS and NVIDIA GRID – An awesome list of blogs to find out more

About a month ago I wrote about an amazing webinar I’d seen detailing how South Florida Water Management had leveraged Cisco, VMware and NVIDIA GRID to solve problems with their original physical workstation usage of Esri GIS software. A must read – here.

Free German Citrix User Event with NVIDIA GRID and HDX 3DPro – 18th April 2016

I was so pleased to receive the below invitation to this event coming up in April from Roy Textor who runs DCUG (Deutschsprachige Citrix User Group / German-speaking Citrix User Group). It’s nearly two years since I blogged about the birth of this group, you can read that here. In the time since then Roy has run dozens of user group meetings all over Germany (I’d love you to comment on this blog if you have attended) and the community is going from strength to strength.

Benchmarking virtualized NVIDIA GRID GPU cards using HPC methodologies! Don’t wear shiny green high-heels in the farmyard!

Follow GRID team’s @AmandaMSaunders and the adventures of the magical GRID shoes!

I’ve been cc:d on a clutch of strange enquiries recently where people are trying to evaluate the NVIDIA GRID GPU cards using HPC (High-performance computing) methods, benchmarks and comparisons. Hypervisors aren’t usually fully compatible with HPC application architecture and as such, although the newest NVIDIA Tesla cards (M60/M6) can be repurposed between a “compute mode” and a specialist “graphics” mode is provided for virtualized graphics designed with hypervisors and graphical application architecture in mind.

The previous (Kepler) generation of NVIDIAGPUs for virtualized graphics (GRID K1/K2) are designed solely for grahical workloads.

A response to APIs, GPUs, and drivers: CAD graphical conspiracy?

I’ve been working at NVIDIA for 7 weeks now. I’ve never worked for a GPU or hardware vendor before. I started off as an Astrophysicist in academia, became a CAD kernel engineer (Parasolid kernel at Siemens PLM) working on applications such as Solidworks, Siemens NX, Ansys Workbench etc. Then I moved on to hypervisor and VDI engineering including virtualized GPUs at Citrix working on XenDesktop/XenApp and XenServer. All my background and experience is in enterprise software development and I still mostly follow CAD and 3D blogs because that’s my passion and experience.

So how much different is working at a hardware (GPU) vendor than to Citrix or Siemens PLM?

Ummm… to be honest half the time I’m not sure I’ve changed jobs. My days are still filled with a lot of very familiar questions and problems; “Is Autodesk certified for use with vSphere when using NVIDIA vGPU?”, “How many Catia users can I put on a Dell R730 server?”, “What bandwidth should I expect when using hidden-line mode?”, “What is the SLA on reported bugs?”, “Is my GRID K2 card supported with Citrix XenServer?”….