Cloud-Hosted GPUs And Gaming-As-A-Service by Humayun
From the post:
NVIDIA is all buckled up to redefine the dynamics of gaming. The company has spilled the beans over three novel cloud technologies aimed at accelerating the available remote computational power by endorsing the number-crunching potential of its very own (and redesigned) graphical processing units.
At the heart of each of the three technologies lies the latest Kepler GPU architecture, custom-tailored for utility in volumetric datacenters. Through virtualization software, a number of users achieve access through the cutting-edge computational capability of the GPUs.
Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s president and CEO, firmly believes that the Kepler cloud GPU technology is bound to take cloud computing to an entirely new level. He advocates that the GPU has become a significant constituent of contemporary computing devices. Digital artists are essentially dependent upon the GPU for conceptualizing their thoughts. Touch devices owe a great deal to the GPU for delivering a streamlined graphical experience.
With the introduction of the cloud GPU, NVIDIA is all set to change the game—literally. NVIDIA’s cloud-based GPU will bring an amazingly pleasant experience to gamers on a hunt to play in an untethered manner from a console or personal computer.
First in line is the NVIDIA VGX platform, an enterprise-level execution of the Kepler cloud technologies, primarily targeting virtualized desktop performance boosts. The company is hopeful that ventures will make use of this particular platform to ensure flawless remote computing and cater to the most computationally starved applications to be streamed directly to a notebook, tablet or any other mobile device variant. Jeff Brown, GM at NVIDIA’s Professional Solutions Group, is reported to have marked the VGX as the starting point for a “new era in desktop virtualization” that promises a cost-effective virtualization solution offering “an experience almost indistinguishable from a full desktop”.
Results with GPUs have been encouraging and spreading their availability as a cloud-based GPU should lead to a wider variety of experiences.
The emphasis here is making the lives of gamers more pleasant but one expects serious uses, such as graph processing, to not be all that far behind.