Amazon Web Services Unveils New GPU Instance for High-Performance Graphics Applications

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) has unveiled a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) GPU instance designed for applications that require 3D graphics capabilities. Powered by a high-performance NVIDIA (News - Alert) GRID GPU with 1,536 parallel processing cores, the new instance is ideal for video creation services, 3D visualizations, streaming graphics-intensive applications and other server-side graphics workloads that demand extensive processing power, AWS said.

With the new GP2 instance, customers can build high-performance DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA and OpenCL applications and services without making expensive up-front capital investments. They can launch G2 (News - Alert) instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs and third-party libraries, the company said.

“Since we launched Cluster GPU instances two years ago, many customers have asked for expanded functionality to extend the power of our GPU instances beyond HPC applications to graphics-intensive workloads such as video creation services, 3D visualizations and game streaming,” said Matt Garman, vice president, Amazon EC2, AWS, in a statement.

 “By enabling the use of DirectX and OpenGL, G2 instances allow developers to cost-effectively build scalable, fast 3D applications on Amazon EC2 and deliver high-performance 3D graphics using the cloud,” Garman added.

Jeff Kowalski, chief technology officer, Autodesk (News - Alert), a world leader in 3D design software, applauded the new development at AWS, “G2 instances for Amazon EC2 will enable us to deliver high-quality, client-agnostic 3D experiences to customers around the world without worrying about hardware performance and scalability,” Kowalski said.  “We also believe this will establish a new standard of design experiences that combine high-performance graphics with the vast compute and storage resources of AWS,” Kowalski added.

The G2 instance has got acceptance from the gaming and interactive entertainment industry. Ubisoft, one of the leading game developers, said the new instance will support the latest trends such as streaming of games from cloud.

Patrick Allaire, technology director, Cloud, Ubisoft, said “G2 instances combine the elasticity and scalability of Amazon EC2 with the GPU’s massive rendering power, allowing developers to cost-effectively deliver immersive and engaging entertainment experiences to a multitude of lower-capability client devices, such as Kindle Fire, iPad and Android (News - Alert) tablets.”

Animoto, an online video creation service, has been using Amazon EC2 GPU instances since they launched two years ago to render high-quality video creations via our patented cinematic artificial intelligence technology. The company is planning to migrate to the new G2 instance type. “We believe that migrating to the new G2 instance type will lower our video rendering costs by roughly 50 percent while giving us more flexibility to dynamically manage instances in accordance with our growing user activity,” said Siddharth Jain, vice president, Engineering, Animoto, in a statement.

“With increasing consumer demand for creating professional-looking user generated content from any device, G2 instances will become an important platform in the post-PC world,” Jain added. G2 instances are initially available in the U.S. East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions and will be made available in other AWS regions in the coming months, AWS said.