Big Blue has announced that it is now offering the Nvidia Tesla M60 GPU accelerator to enterprise clients in the cloud. IBM said it is the first company to do so, giving companies of all sizes easier and more affordable access to virtual desktop applications without having to skimp on performance.
The Tesla M60 (pictured above) is the latest in a line of Nvidia GPUs available through IBM Cloud. The Tesla K80 and the Tesla K10 are also available to companies looking to use the chips to accelerate deep learning, data analytics, and high-performance computing workloads.
Accelerating Desktop Applications
“By adding Tesla M60 GPU accelerators to other Nvidia GPU offerings on IBM Cloud, customers can deploy fewer, more powerful cloud servers while churning through complex jobs faster,” the company said in a statement. The ability to access the Tesla M60 GPU will give enterprise clients the ability to speed through a range of compute-intensive workloads, including data analytics, graphics, energy exploration and deep learning/artificial intelligence, according to IBM.
“IBM is once again among the first to market in bringing the latest Nvidia GPU technology to the cloud, which is driving the next wave of innovation and real-time collaboration across a wide gamut of industries including healthcare and financial services, oil and gas exploration, media, architectural, engineering and construction,” the company said.
The Tesla M60 helps enterprises accelerate virtualized desktop applications, particularly CAD and CAM applications like AutoCAD, according to Big Blue. Clients can spin up these GPU resources on IBM Cloud on an on-demand basis to help cut their processing times from days (or weeks) to hours, compared to using CPU-only based servers, IBM said.
Pay-As-You-Go Supercomputing
“With Nvidia GPU technology on IBM Cloud, we are one step closer to offering supercomputing performance on a pay-as-you-go basis, which makes this new approach to tackling big data problems accessible to customers of all sizes,” said Jerry Gutierrez, HPC leader for SoftLayer, an IBM Company, in the statement. “We’re at an inflection point in our industry, where GPU technology is opening the door for the next wave of breakthroughs across multiple industries.”
The addition of the new GPU to the IBM Cloud will bring workstation-class graphics-processing capabilities to the cloud for the first time, according to Nvidia.
A GPU works in conjunction with a server’s CPU to accelerate application performance. The CPU offloads compute-intensive portions of the application to the GPU, which processes large blocks of data at one time rather than sequentially boosting the overall performance in a server environment.
GPUs, which accelerate more than 400 scientific, engineering, deep learning, data analytics and other HPC applications, are better for high-performance computing than CPUs alone because of the thousands of efficient, high-performance cores designed to process information faster, IBM said.
Image Credit: Tesla M60 GPU accelerator via Nvidia.
