Over the last year, the great folks over at NVIDIA have been very busy.  Last year at this time, they announced the M6 and M60 cards, bringing the Maxwell architecture to GRID, adding support for blade server architectures, and introducing the software licensing model for the drivers.  In March, GRID 3.0 was announced, and it was a fix for the new licensing model.

Today, NVIDIA announced the August 2016 release of GRID.  This is the latest edition of the GRID software stack, and it coincides with the general availability of the high-density M10 card that supports up to 64 users.

So aside from the hardware, what’s new in this release?

The big addition to the GRID product line is monitoring.  In previous versions of GRID, there was a limited amount of performance data that any of the NVIDIA monitoring tools could see.  NVIDIA SMI, the hypervisor component, could only really report on the GPU core temperature and wattage, and the NVIDIA WMI counters on Windows VMs could only see framebuffer utilization.

The GRID software now exposes more performance metrics from the host and the guest VM level.  These metrics include discovery of the vGPU types currently in use on the physical card as well as utilization statistics for 3D, encode, and decode engines from the hypervisor and guest VM levels.  These stats can be viewed using the NVIDIA-SMI tool in the hypervisor or by using NVIDIA WMI in the guest OS.  This will enable 3rd-party monitoring tools, like Liquidware Stratusphere UX, to extract and analyze the performance data.  The NVIDIA SDK has been updated to provide API access to this data.

Monitoring was one of the missing pieces in the GRID stack, and the latest release addresses this.  It’s now possible to see how the GPU’s resources are being utilized and if the correct profiles are being utilized.

The latest GRID release supports the M6, M60 and M10 cards, and customers have an active software support contract with NVIDIA customers.  Unfortunately, the 1st generation K1 and K2 cards are not supported.