everywhere

With Nvidia GRID, architectural students get graphics acceleration in a VDI environment

Architecture anywhere

Roger Williams University enables virtual desktop infrastructure with Nvidia GRID

American independent university Roger Williams University (RWU), • Industry: Higher education VDI with Nvidia Grid classrooms — and it all needed to work seamlessly for adoption to take hold. The first VDI test systems based in Rhode Island, has a • Server hardware: Dell did not work well with the well-established architecture PowerEdge Servers, Grid K2 intense graphics and video course that fosters rigorous • Server hypervisor: environment that an architechnical and design curricula Citrix XenServer 7 tecture department needs, alongside a well-rounded lib• VDI: Citrix XenDesktop 6 explained RWU IT director eral arts foundation. • Virtual GPU type: James Galib.

A key part of its ideology is vGPU-shared Ryan Tiebout, RWU systo offer students programmes • Type of users: Power users and designers. tems operations manager that prepare them for profes- Architecture and engineering said: “As soon as we had sional careers, with working students more than eight to 10 people methodologies that mimic • Number of users: 1,000+ connected, the frame rates what they might find in a real- • Applications: Autodesk in 3D renderings would just world firm. AutoCAD, Revit. Adobe Creative Suite go way down and get jumpy.

As part of that ideology, The software applications architecture students have became very clunky to use been enabled to work from anywhere, on and it just wasn’t conducive to architecany device, even when using graphics-in- ture work at all.” tensive applications like Autodesk’s AutoCAD and Revit, and Adobe’s The solution Creative Suite via a virtual desktop infra- Systems Integrator Logical Front set up structure (VDI). RWU with a custom VDI system dubbed ‘R-Cloud’ featuring Dell Equallogic storThe challenge age, Dell PowerConnectTM switching, and The biggest hurdle in RWU’s transition to a Dell PowerEdge servers running a total of VDI was to provide access to the graphics- twelve Nvidia GRID K2 boards through rich applications that its students require. Citrix XenServer 7. VDI had the potential to let students work Nvidia’s GRID vGPU technology allows with much more flexibility, grow comfort- eight to 16 concurrent users to share one able with real-world practices, and to elimi- GPU — meaning that with this configuranate cumbersome desktops from the archi- tion, R-Cloud can support 96 to 192 concurtecture lab, thus freeing up more space for rent graphics users.

RWU’s IT group saw immediate improvement with the graphics performance on virtual machines, and students responded enthusiastically to the technology and the flexibility it offered. With GRID, architecture students now have the ability to access graphics-intensive applications like AutoCAD outside the lab, and see the same high level of performance on any device. The impact After achieving great success with VDI in the architecture programme, RWU is in the process of rolling out R-Cloud to other departments as well, starting with engineering, with the ultimate goal of making it accessible to all students. Approximately 1,000 RWU students (a quarter of the student body) have access to R-Cloud , with varying levels of graphics power allotted based on their area of study.

“Students tell us that R-Cloud is very easy to access and runs very smoothly,” said Mr Galib. “They love the ability to work on their own devices and still access any application they need, even outside of the lab.

“Even students with lower-end devices are using R-Cloud successfully and get the same performance they would on a workstation thanks to GRID. The flexibility of VDI is a huge value-add to our students, and will allow them to save money on hardware and software in the long run, which is very important to us.”

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