Amazon Web Services Inc. today enhanced its AWS Outposts platform with the addition of G4 instances powered by Nvidia Corp.’s T4 graphics processing unit.

Outposts enables organizations to deploy AWS infrastructure in their own data centers and have the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary manage the hardware on their behalf.

It’s aimed at companies that wish to take advantage of the provider’s technological capabilities but can’t deploy their workloads on its public cloud for one reason or another. A healthcare company, for instance, might not want to move patient records or proprietary research files to a data center it doesn’t control.

“Most companies still keep their data inside their own walls because they see it as their core intellectual property,” explained Justin Boitano, the senior director of product for Nvidia’s enterprise and edge computing group. “But for deep learning to transition from research into production, enterprises need the flexibility and ease of development the cloud offers — right beside their data. That’s a big part of what AWS Outposts with T4 GPUs now enables.”

The T4-powered G4 instances AWS is adding to Outposts are aimed at two main use cases. One is inference, or running trained AI models on live data, while the other is graphics rendering.

G4 instances come in seven sizes ranging from four to 96 virtual central processing units. The five lowest-end G5 configurations come with a single T4 GPU while the top-end models feature four and eight, respectively, plus a maximum of 1.8 terabytes of local NVMe flash storage.

Nvidia’s T4 chip sits below its top-end Volta V100 data center card on the price ladder and has a more general-purpose architecture. Whereas the V100 is geared strictly towards machine learning, the T4 has 40 specialized circuits called RT Cores that help speed up graphics processing. The RT Cores accelerate the task of generating light and shadow effects in media files such as computer-generated imagery for a film.

Photo: SiliconANGLE