Nvidia GRID K1 User manual

WHY GPUs FOR VIRTUAL DESKTOPS

AND APPLICATIONS?

Your smartphone has a GPU, your Tablet has a GPU, your PC has

a GPU and your workstation has a high powered GPU. There’s a

reason for this. The users expect a certain level of visual

experience that you can’t get from a CPU alone. GRID enables

VDI for everyone.

WHAT IS A VIRTUAL DESKTOP?

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the practice of hosting

a desktop OS within a virtual machine (VM) running on a hosted,

centralized or remote server. It allows IT departments to offer

a secure “access anywhere” desktop experience to end users.

WHAT IS A VIRTUAL APPLICATION?

A virtualized application, more commonly referred to as a virtual

user session allows multiple users to run applications in a single

OS (ie: Windows Server).

WHY NVIDIA?

Continuing our tradition of pioneering technology, NVIDIA’s

Kepler Architecture is the world’s ﬁrst virtualization enabled GPU.

NVIDIA GRID K1 & K2 boards bring this technology to the widest

breadth of partner products and solutions.

GPUs ACCELERATE

VIRTUAL DESKTOPS

AND APPLICATIONS

SERVER POWERED

BY NVIDIA GRID

Imagine if responsive Windows and rich multimedia experiences

were available via virtual desktop infrastructure, even those with

intensive graphics needs.

NVIDIA makes this possible with NVIDIA GRID, a virtualized

GPU that delivers a faster, interactive graphical experience to a

variety of users across all devices.

NVIDIA GRID™

OVERVIEW

GRID OVERVIEW

WHO NEEDS NVIDIA GRID™?

DESIGNER/ENGINEER: Traditionally an NVIDIA

Quadro®user, this customer creates and works

with complicated datasets using graphics intensive

applications (3D design, medical diagnostics, etc.).

Related industries: Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, Media &

Entertainment, Medical Imaging, Public Sector

Application examples: Dassault Systèmes (CATIA,

SolidWorks), Enovia, Siemens NX, Autodesk (3ds Max,

Inventor, Maya, etc.)*

*Plus all the same applications a Power User and Knowledge Worker can use.

POWER USER: A user of visual data (such as 3D

images, and 2D graphs and line charts), this customer

represents a new business opportunity. Customer may

also be someone who tried Desktop and Application

Virtualization without GPU acceleration and was not satisﬁed.

Related industries: Healthcare (nurses’ stations, doctors’

ofﬁces, doctors’ tablets), Educational Institutions (target

engineering and design schools), Government (simulation

and training, Geospatial research), Manufacturing (Product

Data Management, Product Lifecycle Management,

Manufacturing Floor/Job Site, Support).

Application examples: SolidWorks View, PTC Creo View and

View Express, Autodesk Inventor View, Siemens NX Viewer,

Team Center Visualization. Manufacturing Product Lifecycle

applications, Adobe Imaging applications, medical imaging

applications, Microsoft Ofﬁce PowerPoint Authoring, Video

editing applications.**

**Plus all the same applications a Knowledge Worker can use.

KNOWLEDGE WORKER: This is typically

an ofﬁce worker who uses Ofﬁce applications,

email, video conferencing and rich media internet

applications.

Related industries: Financial Services (Retail, Commercial

and Investment Banking, Insurance), Manufacturing,

Life Sciences, Oil & Gas, Media & Entertainment,

Telecommunications, Government, Education, Technology.

Application examples: Microsoft Ofﬁce (PowerPoint graphics),

Photoshop, etc.

EXAMPLES OF INDUSTRIES WHERE

GRID CAN BE USED

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONSMANUFACTURERS

MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENTHEALTHCARE PROVIDERS

GOVERNMENTFINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

+ +

CLIENT DEVICES CLIENT DEVICES

GRID Enabled Hypervisor

NVIDIA GRID GPU

Guest OS

Virtual Machine

Application

GRID Enabled Virtual

Desktop

NVIDIA Driver

SERVER

Server OS

Virtual Machines

XenApp

Session

App

XenApp

Session

App

XenApp

Session

App

XenApp

Session

NVIDIA Driver

SERVER

App

GRID Enabled Hypervisor

NVIDIA GRID K1 BOARD

NVIDIA GRID FOR VDI

AND APPLICATION

VIRTUALIZATION

NVIDIA GRID PLATFORMS FOR VDI NVIDIA GRID PLATFORMS FOR APPLICATIONS

ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW

TERM DESCRIPTION

Citrix Receiver A lightweight software application that runs on the user's Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android

devices and connects to a XenDesktop virtual machine or XenApp session in the data center.

Citrix XenApp Citrix’s virtualization product that provides remote session capabilities, delivering remote

applications or virtual sessions.

Citrix XenDesktop Citrix’s desktop virtualization product that provides remote desktop capabilities.

Citrix XenServer The commercial hypervisor from Citrix that allows multiple operating systems to run on a single

server node.

Cloud Computing The use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service

over a network. Clouds can be public (delivered over the internet) or private (contained within

a company’s intranet).

Dedicated GPU A case where the full GPU is used by a virtual machine, not sharing it with other VMs.

GPU Pass-Through The remoting technology that connects a virtual machine (VM) to a dedicated CPU. The technology

to do this from NVIDIA is known as NMOS (NVIDIA Multi-OS), from the capability to have multiple

OS’s running on a system, each with their own GPU.

GRID NVIDIA technology that is a combination of both hardware and software to deliver the ultimate

virtualized experience.

GRID K1 NVIDIA’s GRID K1 is a graphics card designed speciﬁcally for virtualization use cases. It

carries four Kepler GPUs and a total of 16GB of video memory, making it ideal for multi-user

conﬁgurations.

GRID K2 NVIDIA’s GRID K2 is a graphics card designed speciﬁcally for workstation virtualization. It offers

two high-end Kepler GPUs, which can support a total of two high-end designers and engineers.

The GRID K2 can also be used for power users and knowledge workers, especially where the IT

department wants to deploy a single resource type across the entire enterprise.

Host Machine A computer on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is a host machine.

Each of those virtual machines is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents to the

guest operating systems a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest

operating systems.

Hypervisor In computing, a hypervisor or virtual machine manager (VMM) is a piece of computer software,

ﬁrmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines.

Kepler The world’s ﬁrst cloud enabled GPU, and the latest architecture from NVIDIA. NVIDIA products

built on the NVIDIA®Kepler™ architecture have names such as NVIDIA Quadro®K5000,

NVIDIA Tesla®K20, and GRID K2 (K for Kepler).

Microsoft RemoteFX Microsoft’s product that enables multiple users to have access to the acceleration of

a single hardware GPU. It is available as a feature of Microsoft Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012.

NVIDIA Windows Server Driver The NVIDIA graphics driver that loads on a server OS. This driver works with RemoteFX to

deliver graphics acceleration.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

NVIDIA has been

supporting, shipping

and certifying

a Windows Server

graphics driver

since 2003.

Kepler, the world’s

ﬁrst cloud enabled

GPU, has up to 7 billion

transistors.

GPU pass-through

was ﬁrst introduced in

2009 to deliver multiple

hardware accelerated

operating systems on

workstations.

GLOSSARY

TERM DESCRIPTION

NVIDIA ESX Driver This NVIDIA driver runs on the ESX (otherwise known as vSphere) hypervisor, which allows VMs

running on top of ESX to get access to a shared NVIDIA GPU for hardware graphics acceleration

when using vSGA (see deﬁnition below).

NVIDIA Driver NVIDIA’s certiﬁed driver that runs inside the virtual machine, giving graphics acceleration

directly to the applications.

Remote Workstation A workstation instance that is running from a data center, and delivered via the network to

a client device. “Remote” can be on premise to the user's ofﬁce, or can be off premise to a

partner site, travel location, or home user.

Virtual Machine The instance of an OS that runs on top of a hypervisor, using the abstracted hardware image

presented by the hypervisor.

Virtualization The practice of abstracting the virtual machine (VM) from the physical hardware that it

runs on. In practice, virtualization is used primarily to run multiple VMs on a single piece of

physical hardware.

> Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) The practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine (VM) running on

a hosted, centralized or remote server.

> Hardware Virtualization The creation of a virtual machine that acts like the real hardware running underneath the

hypervisor, or a subset of that hardware. The software executed on these virtual machines

recognizes the underlying physical hardware resources (i.e. the OS can load a native driver for

that hardware and interact directly with it).

> Virtual User Session The practice of hosting applications in a single server OS and delivering those applications to

multiple remote users.

> Hardware Virtualized GPU NVIDIA Kepler-based K1 or K2 board that allows multiple users to share a single GPU and

allowing each user direct access to the GPU hardware. This improves user density while providing

true performance and compatibility.

> Software Virtualization Software virtualization acts as an interface between the hardware and the VM, creating the ability

to adapt to different underlying hardware conﬁgurations. In this case, the software acts like the

hardware resource, passing commands to the hypervisor which can execute them either on real

hardware or emulated hardware.

> NVIDIA GRID Virtual GPU

(NVIDIA GRID vGPU)

Key technology used to enable the hardware virtualization of the GPU which allows multiple

virtual machines to interact directly with a GPU. The GRID Virtual GPU manages GPU resources

that enable multiple users to share common hardware while improving user density, and creates

a true PC experience in the cloud.

VMware ESX The commercial hypervisor from VMware that allows multiple operating systems to run on

a single server node.

VMware View VMware’s desktop virtualization product that provides remote desktop capabilities.

VMware vDGA virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration. VMware’s productization of GPU pass-through in ESX.

Each GPU in the system is dedicated to a single VM, and the NVIDIA native graphics driver

is loaded in each of those VM’s operating systems.

VMware vSGA virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration. The software virtualization of a GPU in ESX, allowing

multiple users to access a single GPU for graphics acceleration. In this case, the NVIDIA ESX

driver is loaded in the hypervisor.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS CONTINUED

NVIDIA GRID enables

a true PC experience

for the hundreds of

millions of power users

who increasingly want

to bring their own

devices to work.

The GRID Virtual

GPU technology is

integrated into a

commercially available

system level hypervisor,

like Citrix XenServer.

Feature GRID K1 GRID K2

Number of GPUs 4 entry Kepler GPUs 2 high-end Kepler GPUs

Total NVIDIA CUDA cores 768 cores 3072 cores

Total GPU memory size 16 GB DDR3 (4 GB per GPU) 8 GB GDDR5 (4 GB per GPU)

Max power 130 W 225 W

Board length 10.5”

Board height 4.4”

Board width Dual slot

Display IO None

Aux power 6-pin connector 8-pin connector

PCIe x16

PCIe generation Gen3 (Gen2 compatible)

Cooling solution Requires GRID certiﬁed server, passive cooling

Graphics APIs Open GL 4.3, DirectX 9, 10, 11, CUDA

NVIDIA GRID boards are designed for higher GPU densities, with 2 or

4 GPUs per card. For example, with a GRID K1 card, there are 4 GPUs

per card. A server with two x16 PCIe slots can hold 2 of these cards,

for a total of 8 fully accelerated VMs.

NVIDIA GRID™BOARD

SPECIFICATIONS

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Nvidia GRID K1 User manual

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