Nvidia today announced that its Quadro Virtual Machine Workstation (vWS) is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The promise of the Quadro vWS it to allow businesses to run high-end graphics applications in the cloud, using any of the Nvidia’s high-end and mid-level cloud GPUs like the P100, V100, P4 or P40. For the Azure cloud, this specifically means that the Quadro vWS can use Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs with 24GB of frame buffer per GPU.
“We’re focused on delivering the best and broadest range of GPU-accelerated capabilities in the public cloud,” said Talal Alqinaw, senior director of Microsoft Azure, in today’s announcement. “NVIDIA Quadro vWS expands customer choice of GPU offerings on Azure to bring powerful professional workstations in the cloud to meet the needs of the most demanding applications from any device, anywhere.”
The promise of a virtual workstation, of course, is that you can easily spin them up and down as needed and only pay for when they are running. And all the underlying infrastructures is managed by somebody else, as are software and driver updates, in addition to all the financial calculations that come into effect when you are renting workstations in the cloud.
Nvidia argues that these workstations should be especially of interested to users in industries like architecture, entertainment, oil and gas and manufacturing.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s own Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure also supports the Quadro vWS on Tesla GPUs. Indeed, virtual desktops and enabling GPUs for them seems to have been an area of focus for the Azure team in recent months.
