Nov 15, 2010 14:12 GMT  ·  By

Amazon is expanding its cloud computing offering with a rather interesting new option that enables users to take advantage of the processing power of GPUs which can be a lot more powerful for specific tasks than generic CPUs.

"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," Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2, said.

"We're excited to help our customers access the raw power of GPU technology and look forward to the innovation this will enable," he added.

This is the 11th type of EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) instance Amazon is offering, but it's the first time GPUs are thrown into the mix. The instance is quite powerful.

The Cluster GPU Instance is based on Cluster Compute Instance, it's identical in fact, apart from the addition of the GPUs.

It comes with a pair of Intel "Nehalem" X5570, 22 GB of RAM, almost 1.7 TB of storage, a 10 Gbps Ethernet connection and a couple of NVIDIA Tesla M2050 "Fermi" GPUs each with 3 GB of RAM.

The GPU Instance will only be available with Linux and can be clustered depending on the user's needs. By default, users can cluster up to 8 GPU Instances, but Amazon says it can offer more than this at request. There is no technological limitation to clustering more than 8 instances.

Cluster GPU Instances are a bit on the pricey side, available for $2.10 per hour. A regular Cluster Compute Instances goes for $1.60 per hour.

There isn't going to be a huge market for this type of instances, but the ones that will appreciate it don't really have any other option than to build their own clusters, an expensive proposition.