Posted on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 13:08 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inquirer
reports NVIDIA has told customers that upgrading their GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) servers is not possible without voiding its warranty as NVIDIA treats the GRID VCA "as an appliance":
Brown said that while customers will invalidate their warranty if they upgrade a Grid VCA system, "Nvidia wouldn't be draconian" about clamping down on firms that upgrade the Intel Xeon chips or RAM that comes in the servers. He did confirm that customers that opt-in to any monitoring services that phone home to Nvidia will not see it sending kill messages to shutdown machines that have been modified.
According to Brown, the reason Nvidia discourages users from modifying the Grid VCA's hardware configuration is that the operating specifications for the system fall within a very narrow band. Brown's statements might sound suspicious but given his other claims about how the firm built the hypervisor from the ground up, Nvidia's stance could mean that Grid VCA customers will stick with what they buy rather than try to get increased performance by upgrading the hardware themselves.
