University of Bristol delivers boundaryless education through GPU-powered VDI

Digital equity and student accessibility prioritised with new learning platform

With academic excellence and digital equity as core goals, the University of Bristol has modernised its IT foundations to provide a single, consistent and flexible platform that students and researchers can now access from wherever they need to be. 

Working with the IT and cloud consulting company Xtravirt, the University has built a GPU-powered VDI platform. This marks a huge step forward in realising the University’s strategic digital goals – to improve sustainability, equity and accessibility.

Prior to launching the new platform, which was built using Omnissa Horizon®, the University relied on a patchwork of virtual desktop and end-user computing solutions included a mix of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows Remote Desktop, VPNs and other legacy platforms.

For Bristol’s IT teams, this meant managing a wide range of hardware, BIOS and OS configurations across the University’s different departments, which made it difficult to package software in a uniform way. Ahead of each academic year, they had to rip down and rebuild all systems to ensure software was up to date and met all course requirements. 

Labs were traditionally built around expensive, fixed-location PCs. The hardware was often under-utilised outside scheduled teaching times, it was energy intensive, and it offered limited flexibility for hybrid or remote education. 

World-class technology supporting world-wide research

The new VDI platform has been designed and rolled out in collaboration with the University’s academic teams, ensuring it meets teaching and research needs, and operational demands. As well as now offering a seamless service, the new platform has improved digital equity and accessibility, sustainability, operational efficiency, security, and compliance. 

The acceleration in computing performance has been particularly key for disciplines with high-performance compute requirements, such as engineering and data science. 

Crucially, students who lacked access to high-performance desktops can now demonstrate their true capabilities and fully engage with compute-heavy coursework. For instance, students on the Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) unit, the platform allows them to run intensive processes, regardless of their personal device’s capabilities. 

Students are now completing tasks up to 12 hours faster—slashing processing times by as much as 75% compared to traditional laptops. Plus, the University now has the capacity to support up to 1,000 concurrent VDI users.

Professors and teachers have already reported improved quality of their students’ work and more accurate grading, as they can assess the work itself, not the limitations of the device it was created on. 

For example, a group of researchers in Africa can now remotely access Bristol’s infrastructure to run data and processing-intensive workloads without needing to move large datasets. This enables full research productivity with only basic local devices and demonstrates the university’s commitment to boundaryless education and secure global collaboration.

Digital efficiencies

 “Previously, desktop PCs sat idle after hours,” says Jane McGrath, senior project manager for digital strategy at the University of Bristol. “Now, we can repurpose that unused capacity overnight to support high intensity processing. It’s a smarter, more sustainable use of resources. It reduces hardware waste, cuts energy consumption, and extends the life of our assets. We’re also exploring intelligent network technologies that can automatically power down devices or redirect energy to more sustainable workloads.”

For the university’s IT teams, the centrally managed Horizon VDI platform has transformed how desktops are deployed and maintained. Dynamic provisioning and streamlined updates have significantly reduced operational overhead, while application packaging is becoming far more efficient. 

The Engineering faculty was the first to benefit from the VDI transformation, providing them with an alternative, flexible access to specialist computing capability, previously only possible via dedicated labs. This use case now serves as a repeatable blueprint for other faculties. As demand grows from additional disciplines, the University is expanding its Horizon VDI platform campuswide. 

Looking ahead, there are plans to integrate AI into research and teaching using the NVIDIA-powered virtual labs. Horizon VDI may also be available for multi-tenant, isolated desktop environments, which would enable secure, segregated access for external research partners.

At the same time, significant investment is going into an AI-enabled modern network program. This initiative will improve performance monitoring, user experience, and cybersecurity, while providing the high-speed, resilient connectivity needed to scale Horizon VDI globally.