Introduction and N-Series VMs
Whether it’s Photoshop filters, JavaScript in the browser or machine learning, increasingly GPUs are as important to computing performance as CPUs, but you haven’t been able to take full advantage of that with virtualisation or in the cloud.
Windows Server 2016 will let you get full access to the GPU inside a virtual machine, using a hardware pass-through setting called Direct Device Assignment, and because Azure runs on Windows Server, you’ll get it there as well.
“We leverage this technology primarily for GPUs and also for things like NVMe storage,” explained Microsoft’s Chris Huybregts at the Nvidia GTC conference. You can only use the GPU with one virtual machine, but that virtual machine gets access to all the features of the GPU, using the standard graphics driver (rather than the virtual GPU driver that Microsoft supplies for RemoteFX GPU virtualisation).
Direct Device Assignment is how the new N-Series VMs on Azure get their GPUs. Designed for running applications that need high-performance graphics or that use the GPU for high-performance parallel computing, they were announced last September and are currently in preview.
Twin ranges
When they launch there will be two ranges of N-Series VMs, both with …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components
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