Amazon starts offering cloud-based NVIDIA Tesla GPU solutions

NVIDIA announced today that, for the first time ever, enterprises and start-ups will be able to access the supercomputing-class performance of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs through a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, called Cluster GPU Instances. This new offering extends the available options for flexible, on-demand high performance computing (HPC) within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Supercomputing has become an important tool in the process of creating commercial products, from design and simulation-based testing to production. However, the upfront cost of acquiring these systems has, until recently, limited their use to government and university-based research facilities or businesses willing to make the large up-front capital investment. By making GPUs available through Amazon EC2, AWS is now making this available to businesses of all sizes.

"With Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, our customers now have the power of high performance computing, the efficiency and speed of GPUs and the highly available, scalable and affordable cloud environment our customers have come to expect from AWS," said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2. "We're excited to help our customers access the raw power of GPU technology and look forward to the innovation this will enable."

"The ability to run a larger number of more detailed simulations, with an on-demand pricing model and the scalability of Amazon EC2, enables companies to build better, safer, more reliable products," said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at NVIDIA. "GPU supercomputing, through AWS, gives users a flexible computing facility that allows them to scale their computing needs based on user demand."

Hundreds of applications have already been ported to the NVIDIA® CUDA™ massively parallel architecture upon which all its current GPUs are based. CUDA-accelerated applications benefit from being able to access the hundreds of cores in a GPU to run, in some cases, orders of magnitude faster than on conventional processors. Some of the applications ready to be used on Amazon Cluster GPU Instances include mental images' RealityServer® (interactive photo-realistic rendering) and Mathworks' MATLAB (leading technical computing software).

NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, designed specifically for high performance computing environments, deliver transformative performance increases across a wide range of HPC fields, including drug discovery, product design, structural analysis, financial simulations, video transcoding, hurricane and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying the formation of galaxies.