Nvidia is giving people in the UK a chance to test drive its GRID platform

Nvidia announced on Monday that Grid Test Drive, a service that allows users to test its Grid virtual GPU technology, is now available in the UK, although it’s only supported on Windows at present. Grid Test Drive allows anyone interested in Nvidia’s vGPU technology to give it a spin for free for 24 hours, with the firm looking for IT workers and software developers who might be interested in signing up for the service. Nvidia launched Grid in December, claiming it is the “industry’s only” offering that enables GPU sharing without sacrificing application compatibility. Grid is essentially a vGPU service that allows designers and engineers who use graphically intense applications, such as Autodesk Autocad along with HTML 5 web applications, to access them remotely. The applications can be accessed from a range of devices, including PCs, laptops and tablets. Nvidia’s partners so far include HP, Dell, Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft.

Nvidia is giving you an opportunity to test drive its cloud-based GRID platform, a technology that provides remote access to GPU-intensive applications, for 24 hours. The graphics giant reckons that’s all you’ll need to get a flavor of its high performance virtual desktop experience, which runs off Nvidia GRID GPUs, hypervisors and virtual machines hosted in its own data centres. Nvidia says that having access to a high-powered GPU is essential for a smooth experience when accessing 3D engineering and design applications – such as Autodesk, Solidworks, PTC and Teamcenter – through a browser over the internet. Similar solutions can typically take up to four weeks to setup and can cost up to $35,000 (around £21,000/AUS$37,000), it claims. Nvidia Grid Test Dive isn’t a commercially available product that you can buy, but is instead being used in products by its partners. They include Citrix XenApp (for application virtualisation), Microsoft RemoteFX and VMware Horizon View (for GPU sharing or software virtualisation), Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop and VMware vSphere (for GPU pass-through) and Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop (for GRID vGPU or hardware virtualisation). The trial provides access to a virtual machine featuring 8CPU processing cores, 15GB of RAM and a dedicated Nvidia GRID GPU.