Back in July, Amazon Web Services unleashed virtual HPC clusters for cloud computing and virtualization. Now they’re also clustering in GPU co-processors to bolster CPU setups, but also for clustering GPUs. Graphical Processor Units grew out of the need for sheer numeric processing capability to render and display computer graphics. GPUs make excellent foundations for extreme floating-point number crunching that allows CPUs to run structured programs while offloading the heavy lifting calculations.

“We were pleased to introduce Cluster Compute Instances earlier this year for our customers who needed additional network and CPU performance for their large and complex HPC workloads,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “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. We’re looking forward to seeing the innovation this will enable.”

According to the press releases, Nvidia Tesla(R) M2050 GPUs will make up the GPU resources. Nvidia is best known in the gaming community for their excellent video cards that provide beautiful graphics for consumer-level computers and video gaming experiences; but it’s always important to know that Nvidia also produces visualization cards for the extreme crowd as well who use GPUs for Computer Aided Design (CAD) and massive resource computation.

These new cloud services will become a mainstay to allow scientific imaging, data mining, and other processes that usually need seconds on super computers even better cloud virtualization services. A multitude of industries rely heavily on data visualization, such as oil and gas exploration, graphics and rendering, and even engineering design.

According to Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images, “The availability of NVIDIA Tesla(R) GPUs in the AWS cloud in the form of Amazon Cluster GPU Instances running the RealityServer(R) platform with the iray(R) renderer will provide architects, product designers, engineers, scientists and others with extraordinarily powerful tools that they can remotely access on mobile devices, PCs and other devices. Our tests have shown more than 90 percent scaling efficiency on clusters of up to 128 GPUs each.”

The virtualization of this resource will offload the heavy commitment and investment needed to care and feed GPU-centric supercomputers, which will give a considerable number of businesses the ability to enter this lucrative field without having to install their own equipment. Like most virtualization and cloud computing developments, Amazon is putting sheer computing power in the hands of developers in a fashion that allows them to make it both cheaper and more efficient by selling access and computer time. The innovation of adding GPUs to their clusters will allow them to tap into the computation-heavy industries to increase their bottom line and profits while also lowering the bar for smaller businesses to grow into use of the technology.

For more information on HPC capabilities provided by Amazon EC2, visit Amazon’s HPC services home page.  In other news, Nvidia’s expressed its hopes around Android tablets for its future moving forward.