Amazon introduces EC2 GPU instance

Image by Philippe Lin via FlickrGPU programming is an emerging trend in High-Performance Computing. We tried it here and while it doesn't work for most types of computations, it's enormously useful for the others. Now you can try working with nVidia Tesla without buying the expensive hardware. A new EC2 instance called Cluster GPU or cg1.4xlarge provides some serious processing power:
- dual Tesla M2050 board (with 448 cores and 3 GB RAM each)
- 2x quad-core Intel X5570
- 22 GB RAM,
- 10 Gbps Ethernet.

Today there's enough software utilizing the stuff to start working right away: CUDA bindings for C, C++, Python, Java and other languages, OpenCL libraries, GPU-enabled math software. Also Amazon's Elastic MapReduce can utilize both GPU and ordinary Cluster Instances, as well as regular EC2 machines (note to self: we just lived to the day when a virtual machine is regular and a physical machine is a special feature).

Related articles

• New EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster GPU Instance (aws.typepad.com)
• Amazon Announces Cluster GPU Instance for Cloud Computing (insidehpc.com)
• Amazon adds GPUs to EC2 HPC clouds (go.theregister.com)