Nvidia's Maximus technology enhances workstations
November 14, 2011

Nvidia's Maximus technology enhances workstations

SANTA CLARA, CA — Today, Nvidia introduced its new Maximus (www.nvidia.com/maximus)  technology, which accelerates work by enabling a single workstation to simultaneously handle interactive graphics and the compute-intensive number crunching associated with the simulation or rendering of the results. Previously, this was accomplished in separate steps or on separate systems. Maximus achieves this by bringing together the professional 3D graphics capabilities of Nvidia’s Quadro professional graphics processing units (GPUs) and the massive parallel-computing power of the company’s Tesla C2075 companion processor. The unified technology assigns work to the right processor to handle the job.

“Previous workstation architectures forced designers and engineers to do compute-intensive work and graphics-intensive work serially and often offline,” explains Jeff Brown, Nvidia’s general manager, professional solutions group. “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 Maximus-enabled applications — such as those from Adobe, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes and MathWorks — GPU compute work is assigned to run on the Tesla companion processor. This frees up the Quadro GPU to handle graphics functions.

Workstation OEMs, such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and Fujitsu are all offering systems featuring Maximus technology. Maximus desktop workstation configurations start with the pairing of the Quadro 600 ($199) and Tesla C2075 ($2,499).