IBM Corp. has upped the ante for its cloud hosting services, announcing that it is the first major cloud provider to make Nvidia Corp.’s Tesla P100 graphics processing unit available globally.

The rollout of the Tesla P100 GPUs brings Nvidia’s acceleration technology together with IBM’s cloud platform to allow businesses to more quickly and efficiently run compute-heavy workloads, such as artificial intelligence, deep learning and high-performance data analytics.

Nvidia’s GPUs work in conjunction with a server’s central processing unit to accelerate application performance by helping compute-heavy data workloads run more quickly and efficiently. That has helped lead to  breakthroughs in such diverse areas as fraud detection and prevention, genomic research into curing disease, eliminating millions of tons of waste through better inventory management, and automation of manufacturing tasks too dangerous for humans.

The relationship with between IBM and Nvidia isn’t new. The two have worked together since 2014 to bring the latest GPU technology to the cloud, with Big Blue previously having deployed the NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU in 2015 and the Tesla M60 in 2016.

“As the first cloud provider to enable the use of the Tesla P100 GPU globally on the cloud, IBM is making it more accessible for businesses in industries including healthcare, financial services, energy and manufacturing to extract valuable insight from big data,” the company said in a statement. Examples of potential uses include clients in the financial services industry using GPUs on the IBM Cloud to run complex risk calculations in seconds, healthcare companies can more quickly analyze medical images and energy companies can identify new ways to improve operations.

For NVIDIA, it’s another win for a company that originally started out making graphic chips for gaming then leveraged that experience to sell that processing power into data centers to become the go-to GPU maker to power deep learning. In March, the company announced a deal with Tencent Holdings Ltd., China’s largest social media and online entertainment company, to make its GPU chips available in the Tencent Cloud. Previous deals include Nvidia providing Microsoft Corp. GPU accelerators for Microsoft’s Azure cloud and the company also has deals with Google Inc., Amazon Web Services and Chinese e-commerce Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

IBM clients wanting to gain access to Nvidia’s latest GPU have the option to equip each IBM Bluemix bare metal server with two NVIDIA Tesla P100 accelerator cards. The Tesla P100 GPU accelerators will be available to IBM customers in May.

Image: Nvidia