Enabling Remote Working with NVIDIA Virtual Solutions

September 23, 2020

Never before have educational institutions faced the challenges presented by remote working on such a large scale. Fortunately, NVIDIA’s virtual solutions are designed to ensure mobility without compromising on performance. Read on to find out more.

In the current global climate, educational organisations continue to emphasise the importance of remote teaching and learning to minimise disruption and expand education to anyone, anywhere — on any device.

However, while remote working isn’t a new concept, distance learning at scale has introduced a brand new set of challenges, which must be addressed.

Read on to learn more about the key challenges facing educational organisations, how NVIDIA virtual solutions seek to address these, and how Q Associates can help.

The key challenges associated with remote working

The ability to access the same tools and applications required for day-to-day work across multiple devices can be incredibly convenient. However, this relies on educational tools that are highly mobile and interactive.

Utilising rich multimedia is one impactful way to enhance learning for students. For example, both researchers and design and engineering students have a need to run intensive workloads. This includes professional graphics, AI, data science and high-performance computing (HPC).

For IT administrators, managing distributed deployment due to remote working presents a unique set of challenges — particularly surrounding network operations and security. For example, existing networks might not be able to support a surge in users. In addition, data stored on numerous personal devices presents obvious security concerns.

How NVIDIA is solving remote working challenges

With new challenges come new solutions, and NVIDIA’s remote work solutions are no exception. In particular, their virtual GPU technology and GPU-powered laptops and workstations ensure mobility without compromising on performance — even in fast-paced environments.

Educational organisations can extend virtualisation across the entire campus at scale by adding NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) technology to their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

In addition, virtual GPUs enable IT departments to virtualise any application and deliver them through virtual labs by bringing graphics acceleration to the data centre. Put simply, this enables students and staff members to work from anywhere on any device.

As NVIDIA GPUs are supported in the large public clouds, users can also run graphics-intensive applications from any location. For students and staff members who prefer having a personal PC that they can operate from anywhere, NVIDIA’s GPU-powered laptops combine portability with large memory and robust visual computing capabilities, delivering workstation-level performance from anywhere.

Users wanting even more processing power can build their own custom workstations by utilising NVIDIA TITAN RTX ™, or alternatively by purchasing an out-of-the-box solution, such as the NVIDIA data science workstation.

Remote working customer success stories

The University of Cambridge used machine learning technology powered by NVIDIA to write a new musical, ‘Beyond the Fence’ — the world’s first musical formed and heavily crafted by computer.

Harnessing four NVIDIA GPUs hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the university was able to analyse factors including cast size, setting and themes to determine what separates a hit musical from a flop — resulting in a one-of-a-kind musical.

The University of Arkansas used NVIDIA to provide students with access to powerful lab applications, allowing them to enjoy a desktop-like user experience from anywhere in the world, in line with the university’s bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy.

Leveraging NVIDIA Quadro vDWS and NVIDIA GRID vPC and GRID vApps, the institution was able to roll out a new graphics-accelerated VDI environment. This resulted in the added benefit of reducing IT maintenance requirements, freeing up time to focus on higher-value projects.

Finally, Georgia Tech utilised NVIDIA technology to build a deep learning-equipped robot to help people requiring physical assistance getting dressed (for example due to an injury or a disability).

Harnessing GPU-powered instances on AWS with the cuDNN-accelerated Keras and TensorFlow deep learning frameworks, the system was able to analyse nearly 11,000 simulated examples of a robot putting a gown on a human arm to train the robot (named PR2).

Why Q Associates for NVIDIA virtual solutions?

As an award-winning independent provider of specialist IT solutions and services, we provide technology solutions to customers across the UK and beyond.

We work alongside some of the world’s most innovative technology providers to design, deliver and support our customers’ critical IT service platforms, across desktops, data centres and clouds.

Q Associates is also an NVIDIA Preferred Partner and has built a strategic relationship with NVIDIA that enables us to deliver high-performance, supercharged computing for artificial intelligence and machine learning using NVIDIA GPU products and solutions.

With individually certified and accredited technical consultants, our experts are on hand to help remove your IT complexity, enable digital transformation and help you meet the ever-evolving demands of your business, whether that’s remote working or something else.

We are proud of the work that we do and would love to discuss your strategic IT priorities and challenges in more detail. To find out how we can help you enable remote working in your organisation, please get in touch on 01635 248181 or email nvidia@qassociates.co.uk.

We recently published a guide exploring how NVIDIA is helping educational organisations solve their remote working challenges (with real-life examples). Click here to download your free copy of the guide and discover how NVIDIA could unlock your remote working potential.