The Amazon EC2 G4ad family of cloud workstations, which are powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and second-generation AMD EPYC processors, now support Teradici Cloud Access Software (CAS) as an alternative to Amazon’s NICE DCV remote display protocol.
Teradici Cloud Access Software (CAS) is used to stream pixels from the cloud to virtually any end device via an encrypted streaming session using the PCoIP protocol.
CAS places a big emphasis on high-fidelity ‘lossless’ image quality so is well suited to users of 3D CAD, design viz and other demanding 3D applications.
It also works well with a variety of input devices, including the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse and Wacom tablets and pen displays. There are a range of software clients including Windows, Linux, Android tablets and MacOS as well as thin and zero client options.
Teradici’s first PCoIP software was single-threaded, so it ran on a single CPU core. Its successor, PCoIP Ultra, which was introduced in 2019, can take advantage of multiple CPU cores, so looks well suited to the Amazon EC2 G4ad cloud workstation family, which start at 16 cores thanks to the 64-core 2nd generation AMD EPYC processors.
According to Teradici’s Ian Main in this 2020 interview with AEC Magazine, multi-threading the PCoIP protocol has enabled Teradici to dramatically improve the user experience.
Amazon EC2 G4ad instances are available in three sizes:
G4ad.4xlarge (16 vCPUs, 64GB memory and 1 GPU); G4ad.8xlarge (32 vCPUs, 128GB memory and 2 GPUs); and G4ad.16xlarge (32 vCPUs, 128GB memory and 4 GPUs) so instances can be matched to use cases, applications and workflows and optimised for price / performance.
Amazon AWS G4ad and Teradici CAS bundled instances for Windows are now available on the AWS Marketplace.
