This blog post is written by Mike Lim, Senior Public Sector SA.

Video editing, professional visualization, and video games can be resource demanding applications that require high performance Windows workstations with GPUs. When developing these resource demanding applications, a high-performance remote display protocol is desirable in order to access the instances’ graphical desktops from the internet. Using NICE DCV provides a bandwidth-adaptive streaming protocol that provides near real-time responsiveness without compromising image quality. Customers using NICE DCV can leverage Amazon EC2 G4 and Amazon EC2 G5 GPU instances which support graphic-intensive applications in the cloud using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. By using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with NICE DCV, customers can run graphically intensive applications remotely and stream their user interface to simpler client machines, eliminating the need for expensive dedicated workstations.

This post shows how you can provision and manage an Amazon EC2 GPU Windows instance and access it via the high-performance NICE DCV remote display protocol.

Solution overview

The solution is illustrated in the following figure.

Figure 1: Solution overview

We used the AWS CloudFormation Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) service to provision our solution. Our CloudFormation template provides the following functionality:

1.       Using AWS CloudFormation, you can specify your choice of EC2 instance type, the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and subnet in which to provision. You also have the option to assign a static IPv4 address. NICE DCV server is installed to provide remote access, and you can specify the choice of graphics driver to install.

2.       A security group is created and associated with the EC2 instance, and it acts as a firewall.

3.       An AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role is created and associated with the EC2 instance using an instance profile. It lets your instance access Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets for NICE DCV server license validation, and download and install the latest graphics drivers.

4.       The IAM role also makes sure that your EC2 instance can be managed by AWS Systems Manager. This service provides in-browser command line and graphical access to your Windows instance via Session Manager and Fleet Manager from the AWS Management Console.

Walkthrough

The following sections walk through the steps to setup and maintain your graphics workstation. To begin, you need an AWS account. For this walkthrough, we provision a g5.xlarge instance for cloud gaming.

Check instance type availability

For best performance and lowest latency, you will want to provision EC2 in the AWS Region nearest to you. Before proceeding, verify that the g5.xlarge instance type is available in your desired AWS Region, and the Availability Zones (AZs) in which it is available.

Log in to your Amazon EC2 console and select your AWS Region. From the navigation pane, choose Instance Types to view the instance types available. In the search bar, filter instances types to the specific instance type you want, in this case g5.xlarge. Toggle the display preferences (gear) icon to display Availability zones column.

In the following screenshot, the g5.xlarge instance is available in two of the three AZs in eu-west-2 Europe London Region.

Figure 2: Amazon EC2 console instance types

Check Amazon EC2 running on-demand G instances quota

Your AWS account has a limit on the number and type of EC2 instances types you can run, and you need to make sure you have enough quota to run the g5.xlarge instance.

Go to the Service Quotas console for your AWS Region. Under AWS services in the navigation pane, select Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and search for Running On-Demand G and VT instances. Verify that the Applied quota value number is equal or more than the number of vCPUs for the instance size you need. In the following screenshot, the applied quota value is 64. It lets us launch instance sizes from 4 vCPUs xlarge up to 64 vCPUs 16xlarge instance size.

Figure 3: Service Quotas console

You can request a higher quota value by selecting Request quota increase.

Using CloudFormation template

Download the CloudFormation template file from aws-samples GitHub repository. Go to the CloudFormation console for your AWS Region to create a stack, and upload your downloaded file.

The CloudFormation parameters page is divided into the following sections:

1. AMI and instance type
2. EC2 configuration
3. Allowed inbound source IP prefixes to NICE DCV port 8443
4. EBS volume configuration

We go through the configuration settings for each section in detail.

AMI and instance type

In this section, we select the Windows Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to use, EC2 instance type to provision, and graphics driver to install. The default AMI is Microsoft Windows Server 2022.

Replace the instanceType value with g5.xlarge.

Figure 4: CloudFormation parameters: AMI and instance type

Select driverType based on your instance type and the following use case:

1. AMD: select this for instance types with AMD GPU (G4ad instance).
2. NVIDIA-Gaming: select this to install the NVIDIA gaming driver, which is optimized for gaming (G5 and G4dn instances).
3. NVIDIA-GRID: select this to install the GRID driver, which is optimized for professional visualization applications that render content such as 3D models or high-resolution videos (G5, G4dn, and G3 instances).
4. none: select this option for accelerated computing instances, such as P2 and P3 instances where you download and install public NVIDIA drivers manually.
5. NICE-DCV: this installs the NICE DCV Virtual Display driver and is suitable for all other instance types.

Note that GRID and NVIDIA gaming drivers’ downloads are available to AWS customers only. Upon installation of the software, you are bound by the terms of the NVIDIA GRID Cloud End User License Agreement.

For our walkthrough, select NVIDIA-Gaming for driverType.

Amazon EC2 configuration

In this section, we specify the VPC and subnet in which to provision our EC2 instance. You can select default VPC from the vpcID dropdown. Make sure that the subnetID value you select is in your selected VPC and resides in an AZ that has your instance type offering. You can also change the EC2 instance name.

Select Yes for the assignStaticIP option if you want to associate a static Internet IPv4 address. Note that there is a small hourly charge when the instance is not running.

Figure 5: CloudFormation parameters: Amazon EC2 configuration

Allowed inbound source IP prefixes to NICE DCV port 8443

Here, we specify the source prefixes allowed to access our instance. The default values allow access from all addresses. To secure access to your instance, you may want to limit the source prefix to your IP address.

To get your IPv4 address, go to https://checkip.amazonaws.com and append /32 to the value for ingressIPv4. The default VPC and subnet is IPv4 only. Therefore, you can enter ::1/128 to explicitly block all IPv6 access for ingressIPv6.

Figure 6: CloudFormation parameters: Allowed inbound source IP prefixes

Amazon EBS volume configuration

The default Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume size is 30 GiB. You can specify a larger size by changing the volumeSize value.

Figure 7: CloudFormation parameters: Amazon EBS volume configuration

Continue to provision your stack.

NICE DCV client

NICE DCV provides an HTML5 client for web browser access. For performance and additional features, such as QUIC UDP transport protocol support and USB remotization support, install the native client from the NICE DCV download page. NICE DCV offers native clients for Windows, MacOS for both Intel and Apple M1 processors, and modern Linux distributions including RHEL, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu.

Cloudformation Outputs

Once provisioning is complete, go to the Outputs section.

Figure 8: CloudFormation Outputs

The following URLs are available.

1. DCVwebConsole
2. EC2instance
3. RdpConnect
4. SSMsessionManager

We go through the purpose of each URL in the following sections.

SSMsessionManager: Change administrator password

To log in, you must specify an administrator password. Open the SSMsessionManager value URL in a new browser tab and run the command net user administrator <YOUR-PASSWORD> where <YOUR-PASSWORD> is the password on which you decided.

Figure 9: Systems Manager session manager

DCVwebConsole: Connecting to the EC2 instance

Copy DCVWebConsole value, open the NICE DCV client from your local machine and either use the copied value or the IP address to connect. Log in as administrator with the password that you have configured. Alternatively, enter the URL in the format dcv://<EC2-IP-Address> in a browser URL bar to automatically launch and connect a locally installed NICE DCV client to your EC2 instance.

Figure 10: NICE DCV client

EC2instance: manage EC2 instance

Use this link to manage your EC2 instance in the Amazon EC2 console. If you did not select the static IP address option, then use this page to get the assigned IP address whenever you stop and start your instance.

RdpConnect: Fleet Manager console access

The RdpConnect link provides in-browser Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) console access to your Windows instance. Choose User credentials for Authentication Type. Enter administrator for username and the password that you have configured.

Figure 11: Fleet Manager Remote Desktop

Updating NICE DCV server

To update NICE DCV server, log in via Fleet Manager Remote Desktop and run c:\users\administrator\update-DCV.cmd script. In the following screenshot, we successfully upgraded NICE DCV server from version 2022.2-14521 to 2023.0-15065.

Figure 12: Updating NICE DCV server

Updating graphics drivers

You can use the download-<DRIVER_TYPE>-driver.cmd batch file to download the latest graphics driver for your instance type GPU. Downloaded files are located in the Downloads\Drivers folder.

Figure 13: Graphics driver download scripts

AWS Command Line interface (AWS CLI v2) is installed in the instance. You can use it to view the different versions available on the driver S3 bucket. For example, the command aws s3 ls –recursive s3://nvidia-gaming/windows/ | sort /R lists NVIDIA gaming drivers available for download. NVIDIA GRID and AMD drivers are in the s3://ec2-windows-nvidia-drivers and s3://ec2-amd-windows-drivers S3 buckets respectively.

Figure 14: Listing graphics drivers on S3 bucket

Use the command aws s3 cp s3://<S3_BUCKET_PATH>/<FILE-NAME>. to copy a specific driver from the S3 bucket to your local directory.

You can refer to Install NVIDIA drivers on Windows instances and Install AMD drivers on Windows instances for NVIDIA and AMD drivers installation instructions respectively.

Customizing your EC2 instance environment

You may want to customize the instance to your needs. For NVIDIA GPU instances, you can optimize GPU settings to achieve the best performance.

If you are doing video editing, then you can enable high color accuracy, configure multi-channel audio, and enable accurate audio/video sync. For gaming, you may enable gamepad support to use a DualShock 4 or Xbox 360 controller. NICE DCV session storage is enabled. This lets you transfer files using NICE DCV client. More configuration options are available from the NICE DCV User Guide and Administrator Guide.

Terminating your EC2 instance

When you have finished using your EC2 instance, you can release all provisioned resources by going to CloudFormation console to delete your stack.

Conclusion

The Amazon G4 and G5 GPU instance types are suitable for graphics-intensive applications, and NICE DCV provides a responsive and high image quality display protocol for remote access. Using the CloudFormation template from amazon-ec2-nice-dcv-samples GitHub site, you can build and maintain your own high performance Windows graphics workstation in the AWS cloud