World’s first virtualized graphics workstation – NVIDIA SLI Multi-OS

Tuesday, April 7, 2009, 6:48
Internet, Technology
488 views
View Comments

nvidia-sli-os-gpu NVIDIA has introduced a new technology for the first time, allowing the users and visualization applications to take full advantage of multiple NVIDIA Quadro GPUs from a single graphics workstation in a virtual environment. As claimed by NVIDIA, this new technology, the NVIDIA SLI Multi-OS offers application performance almost nearly identical to systems configured with a dedicated operating system and GPU. This in turn ensures cost savings to a greater amount, more efficient flow of work and maximum productivity, especially in markets such as digital content creation, sciences, manufacturing and oil and gas.

If we take into consideration the past workflows, that required a combination of graphics-centric applications running on a varied number of operating systems concurrently and also demanded managing of multiple workstations. But, with this new NVIDIA SLI Multi-OS technology, you are allowed to virtualize all resources fully in the workstation. This in turn allows a user to directly assign a dedicated Quadro graphics board to both the host operating systems and a series of guest operating system loaded optionally. Using this SLI Multi-OS virtualized workstation, a designer, artist or an engineer is able to run multiple business critical 3D or compute applications using multiple operating systems simultaneously. And each of them takes the full advantage of the processing power of Quadro professional graphics cards, thus reducing the need for multiple system environments.

The SLI Multi-OS capability is presently available on the new Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800 and Quadro FX 5800 graphics solutions. It works in association with Parallels Workstation Extreme virtualization software and Intel’s VT-d technology and assign both the host and guest virtual machine its own dedicated GPU. The current certified workstation of this latest technology is available in the new HP Z800 workstation and supports selected combinations of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux operating systems.