14 DAY TRIAL // The field of cloud computing and SAAS (software as a service) is becoming more and more interesting these days, as quite a lot of companies (especially smaller ones, who don't afford to setup their own computing grids) prefer to turn to such solutions.
And for this reason, NVIDIA and Amazon have joined forces to offer the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, that grants access to the supercomputing-class performance of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.
This new offering extends the available options for on-demand high performance computing (HPC) within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
According to NVIDIA, hundreds of applications have already been ported to the NVIDIA CUDA massively parallel architecture upon which all its current GPUs are based.
The 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 numerics software).
“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,” added Mr. De Santis.
“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,” commented 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,” concluded Mr. Keane.