NVIDIA

How NVIDIA and Citrix Are Driving the Future of Virtualized Visual Computing

2013-05-23T00:47:21Z

To understand the future of virtualization, check out what Citrix and NVIDIA are up to.

Huang and Templeton announce NVIDIA GRID vGPU on Citrix XenDesktop 7 at Citrix Synergy.

Unveiled this morning by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Citrix CEO Mark Templeton in a keynote address at Citrix Synergy, Citrix XenDesktop 7 can remotely access physical GPU resources using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology.

They told the more than 6,000 conference attendees that tens of millions of knowledge workers can now benefit from graphics acceleration on any platform (Windows, Mac or Android), using any device (desktops, laptops, tablets, even phones), on any application (OpenGL, Direct X, GPGPU or others).

Whether it’s a photo-editing application or one for medical imaging or architectural design, as long as the device has a display and a Citrix receiver, “it now just works,” said Huang, thanks to the NVIDIA GRID vGPU.

In the video below, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Citrix CEO Mark Templeton demonstrate the incredible high interactivity and low latency of working with virtual applications using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology integrated into XenDesktop 7.

While the technology combination won’t be generally available until later this year, interest is already sharp among an alphabet soup of OEMs, ISVs and VARs, as well as a slew of customers.

But businesses don’t need to wait to take advantage of GPU sharing. The launch of XenDesktop 7 enables a new class of rich graphics for hosted-shared environments with NVIDIA GRID technology. Offering unmatched application compatibility, this is the only shared, direct GPU acceleration available on the market with Citrix HDX 3D Pro technology.

The world’s leading hardware-makers are building NVIDIA GRID K1 or K2 boards into their servers.

OEMs and ISVs can validate and certify their wares through our certification program and testing center. And we’ve made it easy: Our reciprocal agreement with Citrix gives apps simultaneous NVIDIA GRID and Citrix Ready certification.

With NVIDIA GRID, virtualized devices and applications “just work.”

The most demanding applications like Autodesk AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit and Bunkspeed SHOT, PRO and DRIVE are already certified. We’ll be announcing more certifications of popular apps soon.

The channel is ready to engage customers as well. M7 Global Partners, a consortium of the top nine Citrix platinum-level IT providers in the U.S., announced its strong endorsement of NVIDIA GRID. They’ve got customers around the world looking to deploy visually rich applications across a wide range of industries. M7 plans to deploy GRID technology on servers from all the major OEMs.

In fact, we revealed last week that 175 customer trials with NVIDIA GRID are already underway. The future of virtualization is looking very bright indeed.

Read more about the news from Citrix and NVIDIA in our press release. If you’re at Citrix Synergy, stop our booth, as well as those for Cisco, Dell and IBM, where demonstrations of GRID technology are taking place. And follow us on Twitter at @NVIDIAGRID.

Update: Post updated to include video from keynote address at Citrix Synergy.

Behind the Camera: A Lab That Perfects Tegra’s Knack for Taking Snapshots

2013-05-22T23:31:59Z

It’s one of the most sophisticated photo calibration labs in the world. It’s at NVIDIA. And it’s not easy to find.

To visit the labs where NVIDIA’s engineers make sure the smartphones and tablets that use Tegra take amazing photos you’ve got to leave NVIDIA’s distinctive – and crowded – main campus and wander through the bland 1980s-era office park across the street.

Step inside NVIDIA’s photo calibration lab for a tour, though, and it’s clear you’ve found something special. The floors and walls of the spotless lab’s four rooms are matte black – to absorb any stray light that could throw off the lab’s delicate instruments. The science-fictioney equipment and dramatic black walls make the lab look like something you might see on ‘CSI.’

Mastering the Mix

Pick and choose: using these ‘tinker’ toys, engineers can recreate any mobile device’s camera.

You’ll notice the most telling detail the moment you walk through the door: a wall lined with black bins filled with scores of different image sensors, lenses and tiny flash modules. NVIDIA faces a unique challenge: our Tegra processors are used in devices from nearly a dozen companies. Each one relies on sensors and lenses from different suppliers, different displays and different software.

By reaching into these bins, NVIDIA’s engineers can replicate the combination of parts used in a boggling array of smartphones and tablets. NVIDIA engineering VP Brian Cabral calls these ‘tinker toys.’ “The first step in building a great camera is knowing what they do,” Brian says as he shows a visitor around the lab. “Every cellphone camera behaves differently.”

Brian knows how to tell this story well. A trim, quick-talking engineer with a precisely-trimmed beard who holds 13 patents, Brian has been studying photography since he grew up in California’s central valley. Brian’s mission: to put Tegra’s visual computing smarts to work in every photograph taken with a Tegra smartphone or tablet.

These efforts include technologies that deliver high-dynamic range images with a single exposure and the ability to ‘tap’ on an object in a frame to keep it in focus throughout a series of shots. Such features rely on a cutting-edge computational photography technology NVIDIA calls “Chimera” that taps into the power of Tegra’s CPU and GPU to make it possible to wring jaw-dropping images out of the tiny camera systems being built into mobile devices. “It’s almost like a Photoshop plugin for hardware,” Brian explains.

Getting Light Right

To do that, NVIDIA needs to know how that hardware works, intimately. Brian’s tour of the photo calibration lab reveals the depth of NVIDIA’s commitment to great photographs. That starts with the monochromator, which helps NVIDIA’s engineers understand the way the tiny sensors built into today’s digital devices see light.

The device – which to the untrained eye it looks like some kind of futuristic space rifle mounted on a table top — is used to measure how sensors detects light. That’s critical because the light-absorbing pixels that comprise each sensor become less sensitive to light the further you go away from the center of each sensor.

Not So Pretty In Pink

An array of instruments help engineers insure Tegra-powered phones get light right.

The result is easy to see, Brian explains. Pick up many smartphones and take a picture of a white surface, such as a whiteboard. Now look at the photo. You’ll notice that the board will appear “pinkish” around the edges, Brian says. That’s because the image hasn’t been corrected to account for the different ways each part of the smartphone’s sensor detects light.

Images taken by a device that uses a Tegra processor, by contrast, will show the entire surface of the whiteboard as white. That’s because Brian’s team has used the monochromator to shoot a carefully calibrated beam of light at a sensor so that each pixel gets light in exactly the same color and intensity.

This let’s NVIDIA’s engineers take measurements that let them build “spectral response curves,” measurements that allow them to adjust how each phone’s Tegra processor handles light from a camera’s sensor, correcting for the differences in the way pixels on different parts of the sensor detect light.

Going the Distance

No detail is too small. Adjacent to the monochromator is another instrument – in a box about the size of a curbside recycling bin – that uses lasers to measure the distance to the edge of the tiny lenses used in modern camera phones.

Like a point-and-shoot camera, the lenses inside smartphones move back and forth as they focus on objects at different distances – the tiny lenses in smartphones just move incredibly small distances. No room for error here.

Knowing precisely how each lens moves helps Brian and his colleagues tune software so that each smartphone knows exactly where the lens is when it moves back and forth within its housing, resulting in better focus.

That precision also helps determine the ‘settle time,’ for each lens, the fraction of a second the lens needs to stop jittering after it’s moved, so that a smartphone can quickly capture a focused image.

Even the images displayed from the camera on each smartphone’s screen are studied, Brian explains, as he picks up a high-speed camera the size of a football. The camera can shoot 50,000CK frames per second. That’s fast enough to study every detail of how the pixels are painted on smartphone’s digital display, so the team at the lab can know how fast an image on the screen can be refreshed and how the colors captured by the camera look on it.

The Still Life From Hell

The tour doesn’t end here, though. Leave the sleek black-walled lab and follow Brian and he strides briskly across the building and you’ll find a room that looks very different from the sleek black lab where we started the tour.

In one room, you’ll find a series of abstract black-and-white patterns are used to test the quality of the images taken by each freshly-tuned Tegra device.

Next door: a room that could be the live-work space from hell. It’s the opposite of the crisp, all-black labs where Brian began his tour.

Every possible indoor scene jammed into a single tennis court sized space: an office, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room are all duplicated in a room whose walls alternate between warm orange and yellow tones and cool blues and greens.

The odd colors and strange combinations let NVIDIA’s engineers test a wide-range of common – and hard to photograph – combinations.

It’s enough to give a visitor a headache. If the resulting photos don’t result in the same, NVIDIA’s engineers know they’ve tuned their Tegra device to perfection.

Fast and Frugal: NVIDIA Demos World’s Most Efficient Cat 4 LTE-Advanced Modem

2013-05-20T21:03:17Z

NVIDIA’s mobile processor for mainstream smartphones – Tegra 4i, which includes an integrated NVIDIA i500 LTE modem, chewed through 150Mbps of LTE data in a demo this week at CTIA 2013 in Las Vegas.

First shown at Mobile World Congress in February at Cat 3 100mbps, this Tegra 4i demo is fully based on a software update – no new hardware, no new processor. This showcases the adaptability and flexibility of NVIDIA’s software-defined radio technology.

Speed to Burn: Tegra 4i chewed through 150 Mbps of data in a demo at CTIA this week.

An additional advantage of the technology is its tiny size. Because the modem is designed with general purpose Deep Execution Processors (DXP), it’s 40 percent the size of a conventional LTE modem. The benefit is a fast, high performance, adaptable modem in a tiny footprint.

Tegra 4i’s modem is also multi-mode. It delivers 4G LTE Advanced and is backward compatible so it can offer LTE Cat 3, 3G, and 2G. That means it will work even where LTE networks aren’t available. Other LTE Advanced features will be coming soon in software.

The CTIA demo used a tester which emulates an LTE Cat 4 network because live local LTE Cat 4 networks don’t exist yet. In this demo Phoenix – the Tegra 4i reference smartphone – is connected to the tester and shows 150 Mbps.

We also demonstrated Phoenix running on a live AT&T LTE network – showing video streaming over LTE and voice calls. It’s a great proof point of our strong progress in Tegra 4i modem stability and performance.

Nearly Three Dozen New CUDA Centers Announced, Bringing Grand Total Toward 300

2013-05-20T19:55:12Z

Nearly three dozen institutions from 11 countries were added this past quarter to our roster of CUDA Research Centers and CUDA Teaching Centers, bringing the total to 273 in 42 nations.

Work being done there includes three-dimensional genome sequencing for cancer research, graphics and numeric programming, and design of programming and runtime systems for heterogeneous nodes and clusters.

CUDA Teaching Centers — of which there are 18 new ones — equip tens of thousands of students graduating each year with the knowledge and expertise to take advantage of the parallel processing power of GPUs (see “What Is CUDA?”). They get free teaching kits, textbooks, software licenses, NVIDIA CUDA architecture-enabled GPUs for teaching lab computers and academic discounts for additional hardware.

CUDA Research Centers – of which there are 17 new ones — embrace GPU computing across multiple research fields. They have access to exclusive events with key researchers and academics, a designated NVIDIA technical liaison and specialized training sessions.

Here are some examples of CUDA-related work taking place at some of our newest CUDA Research Centers:

Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo (U.S.)

The CUDA Research Center at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo supports a diverse range of applied research activities that benefit from CUDA technology. Research applications include ocean modeling, computational bioinformatics, cyber-security and parallel computing education. These research efforts have resulted in several papers, and have allowed undergraduate and graduate students in computer science to collaborate with faculty and students in other disciplines. Interdisciplinary, GPU-centric research is enabling better science through improved scale and resolution, which in turn provides excellent teaching opportunities for applied parallel computing.

Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan (France)

The CFD team in the Department of Mathematics, Center for Mathematics and their Applications develops numerical methods dedicated to GPU-computing for general fluid dynamics. Research focuses on real time visualization and human interaction and on challenging industrial problems involving complex multiphase flow applications.

Pennsylvania State University (U.S.)

Research undertaken by the Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCC) Unit at Penn State is largely dictated by the needs of its various schools, including the Eberly College of Science, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and the College of Engineering. These needs fall into categories such as quantum physics and chemistry, classical molecular dynamics, and computational engineering.

Turkish Air Force Academy (Turkey)

The Turkish Air Force Academy was awarded the National Support Program Grant by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK 1001 #112E281)to study how GPUs can be used in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. This study aims to produce a solution for the re-calculation of dynamic vector fields by developing parallel algorithms which will be computed on NVIDA CUDA-accelerated GPUs.

Additional new CUDA Research Centers include:

Applied Technology Operation at SURVICE Engineering Company (U.S.)
Duke University (U.S.)
KTH Royal Institute of Technology & Stockholm University (Germany)
MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore (India)
National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (TIFR) (India)
Providence University (U.S.)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (U.S.)
Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning (India)
Stevens Institute of Technology (U.S.)
Universidad Industrial de Santander (Columbia)
Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy)
Universität Bielefeld (Germany)
University of Washington – Seattle (U.S.)

The new CUDA Teaching Centers include:

B V Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering & Technology, Hubli (India)
Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (Belarus)
Eckerd College (U.S.)
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China)
Illinois Institute of Technology (U.S.)
Istanbul Technical University (Turkey)
Lanzhou University (China)
Newcastle University (UK)
Portland State University (U.S.)
San Diego Supercomputer Center (U.S.)
Santa Clara University (U.S.)
South China University of Technology (China)
The Army Institute of Technology, Pune (India)
Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste (UNICENTRO) (Brazil)
Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
University of Alabama, Huntsville (U.S.)
University of Washington (U.S.)
Wright State University (U.S.)

We Came, We Saw, We Made Stuff: NVIDIA’s GeForce Team Hits the Maker Faire

2013-05-20T22:07:32Z

A choir of mechanical lobsters, bass, trout, catfish and sharks mounted on a blue Volvo sedan belted out tunes. Children wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Will Render For Food,” clutched bags of kettle corn. Young and old stepped out of the California sun for hands-on workshops on soldering. This is our kind of scene.

NVIDIA’s GeForce team put on a show at the Maker Faire for the tens of thousands of do-it-yourselfers crowding through the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center for the weekend event.

The Faire is at the center of a movement of do-it-yourselfers who take pride in mastering the technologies in the world around them, whether that means turning scooters and sheet metal into cupcake cars — complete with sprinkle-adorned hats — or learning how to mix Diet Coke and Mentos into magnificent, and messy, displays of do-it-yourself science.

Hands on: NVIDIANs walked fairgoers through the process of building a PC.

NVIDIA’s GeForce team fit right in, leading attendees through hands-on workshops showing them how to build their own PC, overclock a GPU and turn a PC case into a work of art.

“The reason we’re here is we want to celebrate the spirit of do-it-yourself,” NVIDIA’s Peter Kingsley said as he toted his 20-month-old daughter around the show. “Building your own GeForce gaming PC is easy, cost efficient, rewarding and a lot of fun.”

In between sessions led by NVIDIANs clad in black and green t-shirts, the GeForce hardware on display at NVIDIA’s booth drew lustful glances.

“What I would give for that PC,” said Chris, as he eyed a machine equipped with three NVIDIA GTX Titan graphics cards.

“I’m a total NVIDIA fanboy,” said David, a freshman at Harvey Mudd College, before diving into a session led by NVIDIA’s Tom Petersen explaining how to tune up your GPU. “All this hardware is first rate.”

Also drawing gawkers: Brian Carter — who runs Bods Mods, a custom PC case shop — hand assembled a robot-shaped PC case out of acrylic over the course of the weekend as fair-goers asked him about his work.

The clear plastic case, and its motorized robot arms, drew plenty of comments as Carter pieced the machine together.

“Amazing, that’s just amazing,” said Andy, who was showing his son, Rob, around the Maker Faire.

Andy, who hand-built his own gaming PC for sessions of “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” was inspired.

“We need to build him one at some point,” he said, gesturing towards Rob, who grinned. “In fact, I think it’s time to get started.”

Mission accomplished.

NVIDIA will be at the Maker Faire all weekend at booth #328. Check our list of workshops and plan your day here: http://ow.ly/l8ODO

NVIDIA Shows Off First 1080p High-Def Mobile Video Conferencing at Google I/O with Tegra 4

2013-05-17T21:21:40Z

Imagine being able to participate in smooth, 1080p high-definition video conferences on a mobile device. Better still, imagine being able to dive in with nothing more than a web browser. No need to install any special browser plug-ins or dedicated software.

That’s the idea behind an amazing technology called Web with Real Time Communications capabilities, or WebRTC, that Google is spearheading. And our Tegra 4 mobile processor will be the first to fully support the royalty-free VP8 video compression format at the core of WebRTC.

Demonstrating our key role in the Android ecosystem, we’re showing how Tegra 4 supports high-definition 1080p videoconferencing on a system running Android Jelly Bean at a buttery-smooth 30 frames per second. With Tegra 4, NVIDIA is the first to offer built-in support for both VP8 encoding and decoding.

That’s four-times the performance of earlier software-only efforts, which delivered only 8 frames per second of video at 1080p. Even more impressive: that performance is accomplished using just half the power, a mark our engineers are hustling to drive even lower.

NVIDIA has been working closely with Google’s Android ,Chrome, VP8 and WebRTC teams to support VP8 hardware acceleration in the WebRTC architecture. The goal: to deliver the best WebRTC experience on Android, Chrome OS and Google TV.

This Tegra 4-powered demo shows off the great work the two teams have done so far.

Drop by the WebRTC pod at the Chrome area at Google I/O to learn more, and to see a demonstration of this technology in action.

SHIELD Pre-Order Moved Up in Response to Growing Buzz

2013-05-17T18:51:37Z

Good news: our partners are so excited about SHIELD that they’re moving up the pre-order date for our amazing new open platform gaming portable.

You can now pre-order your SHIELD today.

Check out what some of our partners are saying about SHIELD:

“SHIELD is a brand new kind of gaming portable and we’re thrilled to be one of the few retailers who will be carrying it,” said Stephen Weller, director of product management at Newegg. “Our tech savvy customers love gaming and are anxious to get their hands on it. In fact, we’ve decided to move up the pre-order date for those customers who want to be among the first to own a SHIELD!”

“Gamers look to GameStop as their defacto gaming destination,” said Joe Gorman, vice president of mobile at video game retailer GameStop. “As Android gamers look for a place to get the latest and greatest gear, it made total sense for us to carry SHIELD. We believe this handheld console will revolutionize the Android gaming market.”

Here’s where you can pre-order SHIELD now:

NVIDIA – store.nvidia.com/buyshield
Newegg – www.newegg.com/buyshield
GameStop – https://www.gamestop.com/android/consoles/nvidia-shield-16gb/109517
Canada Computer – http://canadacomputers.com/nvidia/nvidiashield.php

Look for Micro Center to go live with a pre-order page within the next few days. We’ll update this post with a link to it when they do.

SHIELD Rocks Google I/O

2013-05-17T01:26:26Z

Just days after our NVIDIA SHIELD pre-order announcement, the Tegra 4-powered portable gaming device is making a special appearance on the Google I/O 2013 show floor.

In their keynote address, Google announced Google Play Game Services. The new service will deliver real-time multiplayer functionality and cross-platform leaderboards, cloud saves and achievement tracking. To take advantage of the new gaming services, simply sign in with your Google+ account – Google will save your game info to the cloud and allow you to hop between Android devices and continue your game.

To help showcase Google’s compelling cross-device gaming services, we brought a bunch of NVIDIA SHIELD units to the Google Play Initiative Area and the NVIDIA Pod.

Picture this: you start playing the Tegra-enhanced version of Riptide GP 2 on the HTC One X+, but you want to use SHIELD’s analog joysticks to control that supercharged jet ski of yours. Thanks to Google Play Game Services, you can save your game state (including your ranking and achievements/upgrades), pick up your SHIELD, and continue gaming from the exact same spot where you left off.

With Google Play Game Services, you no longer have to worry about playing your games on the “right” device. You can hop between your Tegra-powered smartphone, tablet and SHIELD without skipping a beat. And you can do it all with built-in multiplayer functionality.

Find out more about NVIDIA SHIELD and sign up for our pre-order at http://shield.nvidia.com.

For more information about Google Play Game Services, head to https://developers.google.com/games/.

Citrix Synergy Advisory: Cloudy With a 100% Chance of Meaty Graphics

2013-05-22T18:04:50Z

Citrix’s annual user conference, Citrix Synergy, is all about the cloud, virtualization and mobility. And we’ll be getting more than a little graphic at the event.

As a first-time conference sponsor, we have a booth just inside the doors of the Anaheim Convention Center that you can’t – and won’t want to – miss. The focus will be a video wall demo that shows what the state of the art in virtualization in the enterprise looks like. The best news? The future isn’t far off.

NVIDIA GRID technology lets businesses enjoy the benefits of virtualization – flexibility, manageability and security – while delivering a full PC experience that doesn’t skimp on graphics performance. That’s why the world’s leading server manufacturers have embraced it.

Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM will all be using their booths to show off their latest servers with NVIDIA GRID technology.

Running in Citrix booth 100, the biggest on the show floor, Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp and XenServer will demonstrate how NVIDIA GRID software unlocks the virtualization and remoting capabilities of NVIDIA GRID GPUs.

Citrix Synergy kicks off Tuesday, May 21^stand runs through the 24^th. Sign up now for sessions on GPU-accelerated virtual desktops and applications, including:

Excalibur: Reinventing HDX for Mobile, 3D Graphics and Beyond
NVIDIA GRID Accelerated Desktops and Applications
Best Practices for Virtualizing 3D Professional Graphics Apps

Learn more about Citrix Synergy on our website and follow us at @NVIDIAGRID. If you’re in town, visit us in booth 303 and stay tuned for some exciting news about virtualization.

HP’s SlateBook x2 Hybrid Tablet Does It All, With Tegra 4 Providing the Power

2013-05-15T20:46:26Z

Stellar news for those searching for the perfect tablet that meets your business and gaming needs – the Tegra 4-powered HP SlateBook x2 is expected to be available in the U.S. in August, starting at $479.99.

The tablet/notebook cross-over combines portability and productivity by allowing users to transform their device into a notebook in no time. Powered by our NVIDIA Tegra 4 mobile processor, the SlateBook x2 offers an incredibly realistic gaming experience, super-fast web browsing and smooth HD video playback, with a quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and 72 custom GPU cores.

And with access to the TegraZone app, users will have a horde of optimized games at their disposal. Worried about the impact that on-the-go gaming will have on your power? Fear crushing zombies will prevent you from accessing, editing and sharing files in the cloud? Leave the agony at home – the SlateBook x2 also packs two batteries, one in the tablet and one in the dock.

Breathtaking visuals and reduced glare are the result of its IPS 10.1-inch full HD display. Plus, the DTS Sound + Solution will treat audiophiles and music lovers to a booming concert like experience. The SlateBook x2 further sets itself apart with HP’s exclusive native printing capability that allows users to print directly from most applications.

Sporting Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 and the full Google experience with Google Now, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google+ Hangouts and access to apps and digital content through Google Play, the SlateBook x2 is packed with functionality.

Whether you’re looking for a portable, high performance tablet for your entertainment, a productive and easy to manage notebook for your work, or even better, a combination of the two, HP’s SlateBook x2 offers the whole package – and pulls it off in impressive fashion.