Today IBM announced that the company is now offering Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU accelerators on bare metal cloud servers. With the new offering, IBM Cloud is bringing high-speed performance to the SoftLayer cloud infrastructure, enabling companies to build supercomputing clusters without having to expand their existing technology infrastructure.
Our global network of data centers, connectivity features, bare metal servers, and GPU offerings meet the rigorous requirements of most supercomputing workloads,” said Marc Jones, CTO for SoftLayer, an IBM company. “By introducing the K80 accelerator on IBM Cloud, we’re giving our customers an even more powerful tool to run demanding applications.”
In addition to bringing SoftLayer supercomputing capabilities to the enterprise, this new cloud GPU capability is especially important for startups and research facilities, which typically start small, using only a few machines and GPU accelerators for testing and development workloads. With the Tesla K80, IBM Cloud provides a scalable supercomputing option that supports discovery and insight for customers in a variety of industries, including genomics, data analysis, machine learning and deep learning.
IBM Cloud is already the only cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider to offer GPU-accelerated computing on bare metal servers. And it is now the only IaaS provider to offer its customers Tesla K80 GPU accelerators in the cloud. By providing such capabilities in the cloud, IBM gives companies of all sizes easier and more affordable access to supercomputing resources.
Customers already seeing value:
- New York University (NYU) recently used Tesla K80 accelerators on IBM Cloud to support a deep-learning course.
- Startup MapD uses Tesla K80 accelerators on IBM Cloud for data and analytics. The solution enables multiple users to query and visualize multibillion row data sets with latencies measured in milliseconds, achieving orders-of-magnitude increases in speed over other solutions.
- Artomatix uses Tesla K80 accelerators on IBM Cloud to apply machine-learning and big-data concepts to art creation, enabling computers to manage many tedious and time-consuming aspects of the process and allowing artists to focus on creating more dynamic games and films. The Artomatix platform enables a single artist to do the work of a team, disrupting traditional art and animation workflows in the video game and movie industries.
These customers achieved their results by coupling IBM Cloud with the Tesla K80’s dual-GPU architecture, which has a large memory that provides more teraflops of double-precision computing performance and gigabytes of memory in a single server—accelerating compute-heavy workloads and delivering 10 times higher performance than today’s fastest CPU.
The Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform is used by researchers and data scientists around the world to drive innovation and scientific discovery,” said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “With the addition of Tesla K80 GPUs, SoftLayer’s unique cloud offering for HPC will dramatically expand access to supercomputing-class performance, accelerating the pace of important new advances.”
The K80 accelerator joins IBM Cloud’s other NVIDIA GPU offerings, which include the Grid K2 and Tesla K10.
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