AWS Now Offers NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstations for EC2 G4 Instances at No Additional Cost

Posted on: Jan 14, 2020

We are pleased to announce that customers who require the world’s most powerful professional graphics can now use EC2 G4 instances to setup NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstations (Quadro vWS) at no additional cost.

G4 instances provide the latest generation NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, AWS custom second generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors, up to 50 Gbps of networking throughput, and up to 900 GB of local NVMe storage. They are optimized for machine learning application deployments such as image classification, object detection, recommendation engines, automated speech recognition and language translation. These instances are also cost-effective solutions for graphics-intensive applications such as remote graphics workstations, video transcoding and game streaming in the cloud. EC2 G4 instances are offered in different instance sizes with access to one NVIDIA GPU or multiple NVIDIA GPUs with different amounts of vCPU and memory to give you the flexibility to pick the right instance size for your applications.

Now with Quadro Virtual Workstation capability included in the instance cost, G4 instances offer the best price/performance for virtual workstations in the cloud with a starting cost of only $0.526 per hour running On-Demand. NVIDIA T4 GPUs used in EC2 G4 instances support RT cores for efficient, hardware-powered ray tracing. These cores, in combination with Quadro vWS, support RTX-enabled applications, for real-time ray-traced rendering and interactive computer graphics. The NVIDIA Quadro vWS on G4 speeds the workflows of creative and technical professionals across a large variety of industries like media & entertainment, architecture, oil & gas, and manufacturing.

“The new Quadro Virtual Workstation offering with Amazon EC2 G4 streamlines access and affordability for our customers who require the agility of professional graphics workstations in the cloud,” said Bob Pette, Senior Vice President, Professional Visualization, NVIDIA. “In the digital economy of work anywhere, anytime, cloud access to Quadro on any device opens new possibilities for designers, artists and engineers working in industries like media and entertainment, manufacturing, AEC, and others.” 

To get started quickly, customers can setup NVIDIA Quadro vWS using AMIs with the full GRID driver preinstalled, available through the AWS marketplace. Customers can also build their own AMIs using NVIDIA GRID drivers that are easily available via a S3 bucket. This allows customers to be in full control of how the instance is setup from OS type to driver version. The combination of low cost, ease of use, and availability of G4 instances across 19 AWS regions worldwide makes AWS the best platform for building, managing, and deploying virtual workstations.

For details on how to use G4 instances for setting up Virtual Workstations, please visit this page.