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Amazon integrates NVIDIA GPUs into cloud services platform

by Pete Mason on 15 November 2010, 12:26

Tags: Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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As well as being a leader in online shopping and a pioneer in digital books, Amazon is actually a pretty major player in the burgeoning cloud-as-a-service market. In expanding its offerings, the company has announced that it will be integrating GPUs into its servers to offer on-demand GPGPU computing.

Graphics cards - or accelerator cards, as they're known in the server market - are becoming increasingly important in high-performance computing environments due to the massive parallelism of the GPU architecture. NVIDIA has devoted a lot of research - and marketing - money into this area over the past few years, so it should come as little surprise that Amazon has chosen to include the Tesla cards in its GPU Instances.

The Tesla M2050 accelerator card powering Amazon's Cluster GPU Instances

Amazon EC2 General Manager Peter De Santis, commented that "with Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, we are increasing the options available to our HPC customers by allowing them to choose between using high performance clusters with high performance CPUs or taking advantage of the unique processing abilities of GPU processors for applications that can benefit from the massive parallel processing power they provide".

The company's approach to web-based services is highly flexible, allowing customers to choose combinations of high-performance CPU or GPU instances to suit their workload. This will only be enhanced by the inclusion of Cuda-powered GPUs which support a growing collection of software packages in fields from computational mathematics to fluid-dynamics. The enhanced HPC performance and the lack of set-up or maintenance fees will undoubtedly make these new clusters very attractive to universities and other research-intensive institutions with limited budgets.

GPU instances are now available at Amazon's North Virginia facility starting at $2.10 per hour (£1.64 in VAT) for on-demand access. More details on the company's internet-based platforms for high-performance computing are also available from its Web Services site.



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