I was lucky enough to be chosen amongst a select few in the end user computing community to attend NVIDIA’s California HQ for their GRID days event, the event was going to focus on NVIDIA starting a community program and bring some of the community influencers together to take a deep dive into their technology now and into the future.
As a number of our customers are utilising NVIDIA GRID technology in their VDI solutions it was an ideal opportunity for me to meet some of the people behind the technology and further improve my knowledge. This was also my first trip to the states so it’s been quite an adventure for me.
The first day started with a surprise visit from Citrix’s ex CEO Mark Templeton, a truely nice guy with a contaegous passion for technology, Mark met us at the hotel prior to heading to NVIDIA and bought his new electric bike and Tesla with him for us to play with.
The electric bike was something quite special with vintage styling and a motor that powered it up to around 30mph with a distance of 30-35 miles. Mark spoke about how he had been using it to get around Palo Alto and San Francisco.
Check out this video with Jay Leno for some more information on the bike
Mark was also able to show us the smart phone controlled features of his Tesla including that ability to remotely control it to get it in and out of tight parking spaces
After playing with Mark’s gadgets we soon were off around the corner to NVIDIA’s HQ where we would be based for the next two days. We kicked off we an opportunity for all the influencers and NVIDIA staff to introduce themselves and talk about what they wanted out of the day. NVIDIA explained the importance of creating a community program around their enterprise technology to act as an engine for feedback from their customers and to share knowledge with the community.
Following introductions we were taught to an afternoons worth of presentations and demonstrations covering many topics, some of which were NDA, so you will have to check back to this blog in the future for more information when they are released!
The demonstrations were one of the main takeaways for me, NVIDIA took us into their demo suite and were able to show us the complete 360 of solutions they offer from gaming too workstation and server graphics, through to in car and deep learning.
I was completely blown away by the demonstrations particularly around deep learning, the power and time saving potential that can be gleaned from using GPU’s for deep learning was immense and the potential when matched by the clear indepth knowledge of their team was incredible.
Following the demonstrations we were lucky enough to meet the relatively new VP and GM of nVidia Jim McHugh who talked us through his first 90 days at the company and his visions for the future.
Amongst the day’s other presentations we got to see some of the early performance testing results of the new VMware Blast Exteme protocol when used in conjunction with offloading and the NVIDIA cards. As you can see in. The image below (pinched from @rspuijit) their are significant benefits from the new protocol and the offload available by NVIDIA.
The day concluded with a visit to some of the team working on the next generation games, including the team that worked on the recent Tomb Raider release, they were able to show us some of the graphical abilities and techniques used in this game and described their jobs as the best in the world.
The evening was concluded by a meal out of town and a game of Bacca, a bowls like game, some drinks and great conversation. All in all a fantastic day, worth this visit and I’m looking forward to day 2.
As ever I am working on a number of doodles covering the event, with the amount of NDA material being covered I won’t be able to talk about everything but here is my first doodle.
Finally here is a short time lapse video of my trip so far
Disclosure: NVIDIA have paid for my trip to GRID days but there has been no obligation to blog or further talk about NVIDIA technology
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