NVIDIA’s Maximus Technology: Quadro + Tesla, Launching Today

Normally we don't publish a copy of NVIDIA's press materials with any articles, but in this case I'm making an exception. NVIDIA put together a number of use cases for Maximus that do a great job of pointing out the market they're going after with Maximus and their latest marketing push.

After 25 years of design and creative professionals anticipating a workstation that simultaneously performs complex analysis and visualization, NVIDIA announced today its arrival, with the introduction of NVIDIA® Maximus™ technology.

The new offering unleashes productivity and creativity, dramatically accelerating work by enabling a single system for the first time to simultaneously handle interactive graphics and the compute-intensive number crunching associated with the simulation or rendering of the results. These previously needed to be done in separate steps or on separate systems.

NVIDIA Maximus achieves this by bringing together the professional 3D graphics capability of NVIDIA Quadro® professional graphics processing units (GPUs) with the massive parallel-computing power of the NVIDIA Tesla™ C2075 companion processor -- under a unified technology that transparently assigns work to the right processor and is certified by industry leading application vendors.

"To those of us who have spent their careers focused on workstations, NVIDIA Maximus represents a revolution," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. "Previous workstation architectures forced designers and engineers to do compute-intensive work and graphics-intensive work serially and often offline. They can now do them at the same time, on the same machine, allowing professionals to explore more ideas faster and converge quickly on the best possible answers."

With NVIDIA Maximus-enabled applications -- such as those from Adobe, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes and MathWorks -- GPU compute work is assigned to run on the NVIDIA Tesla companion processor. This frees up the NVIDIA Quadro GPU to handle graphics functions, ensuring the quality and performance demanded by professional users.

"The real advantage of the Maximus technology is flexibility and increased productivity," said Tim Ong, vice president of Mechanical Engineering for Sunnyvale, CA-based Liquid Robotics. "Allowing each engineer to do multiple things at once is transformative for our workflow. It's a tremendous tool to allow my engineers to be flexible, to multitask, and to be more productive because they're not waiting on computational power."

NVIDIA Maximus Technology Immediately Available
The world's leading workstation OEMs -- including HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu -- are all offering workstations featuring NVIDIA Maximus technology, available for configuration and purchase immediately.

NVIDIA Maximus desktop workstation configurations start with the pairing of the NVIDIA Quadro 600 ($199 MSRP, USD) + NVIDIA Tesla C2075 ($2,499 MSRP, USD).

Quotes

Product Design, Styling and Visualization
"Autodesk's 3ds Max 2012 has received top scores by reviewers, and one of the reasons they cite is the new iray photorealistic renderer from NVIDIA. We've taken this to another level with our announcement of the ActiveShade integration with iray -- giving our subscription users an interactive rendering experience -- especially if they are using an NVIDIA Quadro GPU, or the new NVIDIA Maximus solution that's up to 9X faster than a single CPU."
-Ken Pimentel, director, Media Design, Autodesk

"Bunkspeed PRO 2012 combines Bunkspeed Shot PRO and Bunkspeed Move PRO into one easy to use interactive ray tracing package built on CUDA powered NVIDIA iray. NVIDIA Maximus powered workstations allow designers, engineers, marketers and architects to render their 3D models with Bunkspeed PRO up to 8x faster than on CPUs alone, with a whole new level of realism and interactivity." 
-Philip Lunn, founder and CEO, Bunkspeed

"By harnessing the power of GPU computing we have been able to create a more productive, high-performance, interactive user experience and, at the same time, dramatically increase the realism of visualization tools available for designers and engineers within CATIA V6. With NVIDIA Maximus, users will be able to experience the full power of these new visualization tools in their product design workflow."
-Xavier Melkonian, director, CATIA Shape Domain, Dassault Systèmes

Engineering Simulation
"GPU computing can dramatically accelerate ANSYS engineering software simulations on workstations, in some cases doubling the number of simulations that can be considered and helping customers to adopt more pervasive use of engineering simulation. With NVIDIA Maximus platforms widely available, enterprises can now more easily take advantage of ANSYS at their desk for both interactive and computationally intensive tasks."
-Barbara Hutchings, director of strategic partnerships at ANSYS

Digital Video Content Creation
"Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5.5 and the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs continue to lead the industry with exceptional performance in non-linear editing. NVIDIA Maximus enables video professionals to create complex, multiple-layer projects faster, further increasing their productivity and empowering their creativity."
-Bill Roberts, director of professional video and audio product management, Adobe

Technical Computing
"MATLAB users want to take advantage of GPUs to achieve significant speed-up of their applications quickly and easily, without making major changes to their MATLAB code. The wide availability of pre-qualified NVIDIA Maximus systems for MATLAB gives our users access to commodity platforms that deliver great productivity."
-Loren Dean, director of Engineering, MATLAB Products, MathWorks

Workstation OEMs
"HP's Z Workstations meet the needs of some of the most compute-intensive industries in the world. With NVIDIA Maximus technology, HP is providing a powerful, new performance solution that will enable our customers to design and analyze more efficiently, ultimately increasing ROI."
-Jeff Wood, vice president, Worldwide Marketing, Commercial Solutions, HP

HP entry-level Z400 and top-of-the line Z800 workstations are available now worldwide.

"NVIDIA Maximus enables our customers to accelerate their visualization and complex parallel workloads. When combined with Dell Precision workstation solutions, our design, research and digital content creation customers can increase their interactivity, productivity and creative freedom."
-Greg Weir, marketing director, Dell Precision Workstation Product and ISV Marketing

Dell Precision T5500, R5500, and T7500 are available now worldwide.¹

"Application acceleration speeds up the design process and product delivery, and with NVIDIA Maximus on Lenovo ThinkStations, users have the parallel processing power they need to boost productivity, creativity, and time-to-market. NVIDIA Maximus-class ThinkStation S20, C20, and D20 workstations transform workflows with computing and visualization capabilities that empower engineers, designers and digital content creators to achieve amazing results exponentially faster."
-Rob Herman, director of Product and Vertical Solutions, ThinkStation Business Unit, Lenovo

Lenovo ThinkStation S20, C20 and D20 workstations are available now worldwide.

"Our advanced and superior line of Fujitsu CELSIUS workstations, including our CELSIUS M and R series, become even more powerful and versatile performers with NVIDIA Maximus technology. Our customers demand the most innovative technology for driving the new generation of high-performance 3D modeling, animation, real-time visualization, analysis, and simulation applications -- NVIDIA Maximus-powered CELSIUS workstations provide the customized visualization plus computation performance they need."
-Dieter Heiss, head of Workplace Systems at Fujitsu Technology Solutions

Fujitsu CELSIUS M470, R570 and R670 workstations are available now in EMEAI and Japan.

For more information about NVIDIA Maximus Technology, visit: www.nvidia.com/maximus.

Follow NVIDIA Workstation/Quadro on YouTube and Twitter: @NVIDIAQuadro.