Amazon Web Services Announce Cluster GPU Instances

By DE Editors

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company has announced Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, a new instance type designed to deliver GPU processing in the cloud. For many organizations, GPU processing has been out of reach due to the infrastructural challenges and cost of the technology, according to the company. Amazon Cluster GPU Instances remove this barrier by providing immediate access to the compute performance of GPUs with no upfront investment or long-term commitment.

Amazon Cluster GPU Instances provide 22GB of memory,  33.5 EC2 Compute Units, and use the Amazon EC2 Cluster network, which provides high throughput and low latency for HPC and data intensive applications. Each GPU instance features two NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs, delivering peak performance of more than 1 trillion double-precision FLOPS.  Many workloads can be accelerated by taking advantage of the parallel processing power of hundreds of cores in the new GPU instances.

Amazon Cluster GPU Instances extend the options for running HPC workloads in the AWS cloud. Cluster Compute Instances, launched earlier this year, provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network.  Cluster GPU Instances give customers with HPC workloads an additional option to further customize their high performance clusters in the cloud. For those customers who have applications that can benefit from the parallel computing power of GPUs, Amazon Cluster GPU Instances can often lead to even further efficiency gains.  By leveraging both instance types, HPC customers can tailor their compute cluster to best meet the performance needs of their workloads.  

“For the first time ever, AWS is putting the industry’s most powerful photo-realistic rendering technology within reach of anyone connected to the Internet,” says Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “The availability of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs in the AWS cloud in the form of Amazon Cluster GPU Instances running the RealityServer platform with the iray renderer will provide architects, product designers, engineers,  scientists and others with extraordinarily powerful tools that they can remotely access on mobile devices, PCs and other devices. Our tests have shown more than 90% scaling efficiency on clusters of up to 128 GPUs each.”

For more information, visit Amazon EC2.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.