Just recently, Nvidia announced a welcomed addition to its SLI technology that will unquestionably aid the expansion of parallel processing in the workstation market. The solution, known as SLI Multi-OS, enables multiple Quadro GPUs to be used from a single graphics workstation in a virtualized environment.

Currently, the company has plans to enable the technology only on its newly released Quadro FX 3800, FX 4800 and FX 5800 workstation cards which retail for $899, $1,799 and $3,299 respectively. While the price of SLI might seem high, keep in mind that it still brings significant cost reduction benefits for professionals in markets such as digital content creation, sciences, manufacturing, and oil and gas.

"In today's economy, organizations are turning to virtualization to increase productivity and maximize cost savings," says Jeff Brown, general manager of professional solutions at Nvidia. "Now professionals working with visualization applications can benefit from virtualization.

The first professional workstation to implement the new technology is the HP Z800 Workstation, packed with dual Intel Xeon 5500-series LGA 1366 processors and ready for Multi-OS SLI with any of the three new Quadro GPUs. According to Nvidia, "the combination of these innovative technologies delivers application performance nearly identical to systems configured with a dedicated operating system and GPU."

Indeed, several industry professionals have already embraced the effectiveness of the new technology for its parallel approach to expanding virtualization efficiency. Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, a leader in virtualization and automation software, said that “by combining the existing Parallels FastLane architecture with NVIDIA’s new SLI Multi-OS capability, even the most demanding professionals can now experience the advanced features and performance benefits of NVIDIA’s Quadro GPUs in a virtualized environment. This is a first for the industry and the business benefits will drive greater engineering innovation and productivity.”