ACADEMIA

Scientists, engineers and software developers are always looking for innovative ways to accelerate performance and shorten computational cycles. SoftLayer is looking to help them out by offering a new high-performance computing (HPC) cloud-enabled solution consisting of servers powered by the latest GPUs (graphics processing units) from NVIDIA.

SoftLayer’s new offering provides an on-demand, consumption-based model for high-performance computing (HPC) users looking to meet the most compute-intensive environments. These environments include traditional HPC fields such as data mining, numerical and seismic analysis as well as advertising agencies, game developers and interactive media firms with needs including video processing and 3D rendering.

“Using GPUs for running applications is an emerging trend in HPC today. Computing requirements continue to skyrocket but users remain as demanding as ever. They want capacity on-demand and prefer to pay only for what they use. It is incumbent on hosters to deliver this capacity in a cloud-like fashion if they want to break into this market,” said Philbert Shih, Managing Director, Structure Research Ltd. “Giving people the ability to scale GPU resources adds incredible flexibility in the way research, engineering and development projects are conducted. By putting such raw computational power into a user’s hands, in an easy pay as you go model, the focus is on research results not acquiring or maintaining the latest technology.”

GPUs work in conjunction with the server’s CPU to accelerate application and processing performance. The GPU offloads compute-intensive portions of the application from the CPU to accelerate overall performance of the machine, dramatically boosting overall application performance. SoftLayer’s solution consists of dual-processor Intel E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) based servers supporting one or two NVIDIA Tesla^® M2090 GPUs, the flagship of NVIDIA’s range of data center GPU products, delivering up to 665 gigaflops of double precision floating point performance. As a result, SoftLayer users will see a massive performance boost with HPC applications accelerated by as much as ten times. SoftLayer’s HPC servers are available on-demand and can be provisioned via the company’s portal, mobile apps or API.

“We are offering breakthrough performance in a unique delivery model,” said Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer of SoftLayer. “The beauty of this solution is the way users can break down the toughest computational problems and largest blocks of data to work them in parallel over our network driving quicker results. GPU technology is still in its infancy but customer demand continues to soar as more and more HPC applications get migrated over to cloud infrastructures.”

“The SoftLayer HPC cloud offering brings the game-changing benefits of GPU technology to significantly more scientists and industrial users around the world,” said Sumit Gupta, senior director of NVIDIA’s Tesla business. “Tesla GPUs deliver power-efficient, ultra-high performance to accelerate a range of computationally intensive HPC applications.”

Key features and benefits:

• Cost effective HPC (ideal for scientific and technical computing)
• Massive compute performance increase while accelerating application speeds by up to 10x
• Cluster management and GPU monitoring
• Parallel compute environment operates invisibly to the user
• GPUs specifically designed to work as computational accelerators

Availability & Pricing

SoftLayer HPC servers with NVIDIA GPUs start at $879.00 per-month for a configuration including one GPU, 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage.