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There’s more news on how graphics processors developed for the consumer market are making major speed improvements inside the enterprise IT world of cloud services.
IBM revealed Jan. 31 that the newest Nvidia V100 GPU–which has its roots in the video-game world–is now available on the IBM Cloud to accelerate artificial intelligence and high-performance computing apps.
And accelerate workloads is precisely what it does. The Nvidia V100 GPU is the fastest GPU accelerator to date, and when combined with the performance of IBM Cloud is designed to enable enterprises, data scientists and researchers to create innovative cloud-native applications that generate new value.
John Considine, IBM General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Services, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, wrote in a blogpost that “starting today, you can equip individual IBM Cloud bare metal servers with up to two Nvidia Tesla V100 PCIe GPU accelerators—Nvidia’s latest, fastest and most advanced GPU architecture.
“The combination of IBM high-speed network connectivity and bare metal servers with the Tesla V100 GPUs provides the performance and speed that enterprises need. That means AI models that once needed weeks of computing resources can now be trained in just a few hours.”
This is not an insignificant option for some IT managers.
Knowing that performance and rapid provisioning are important for AI and HPC workloads, IBM is also providing bare metal support for the Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU and will also make that chip available on IBM Cloud virtual servers. This provides power and high performance for AI and deep learning workloads inside IBM’s virtual servers.
IBM claims that with the Tesla P100 GPU accelerator, users can obtain up to 65 percent more deep-learning capabilities and 50 times the performance than its predecessor.
IBM has built a $17 billion cloud business, Considine said, by staying focused on providing enterprises with a unified cloud architecture that helps them gain insights from their data no matter where it resides and tapping into higher value services such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT and serverless cloud computing.
IBM has been working closely with Nvidia for about three years to bring the latest GPU technology to the cloud and was the first to offer a comprehensive suite of GPUs including the P100, K80 and M60.