Amazon and Nvidia enable new EC2 GPU Instance Type – Brings powerful CAD/3D apps to the masses via the Cloud

This week, in parallel with Autodesk’s related announcement, Amazon announced along with Nvidia, new GPU Instance Type for new Amazon EC2. G2 instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance designed for applications that require 3D graphics capabilities.

NVIDIA Powered

Amazon’s web services computing infrastructure is backed by a high-performance NVIDIA GRID™ GPU with 1,536 parallel processing cores, making it ideal for 3D visualizations and advanced CAD/BIM and graphics-intensive applications and other server-side graphics workloads.

With this new instance type customers (see Autodesk announcement) can build DirectX and OpenGL, CUDA and OpenCL based applications and services and deliver them via Amazon’s Web Services cloud infrastructure.

“Since we launched Cluster GPU instances two years ago, many customers have asked for expanded functionality to extend the power of our GPU instances beyond HPC applications to graphics-intensive workloads such as video creation services, 3D visualizations and game streaming,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “By enabling the use of DirectX and OpenGL, G2 instances allow developers to cost-effectively build scalable, fast 3D applications on Amazon EC2 and deliver high-performance 3D graphics using the cloud.”

Availability

Customers can launch G2 instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs and third-party libraries. Initially, G2 instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions and will be made available in other AWS regions in the coming months. G2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand, Reserved and Spot instances. For more information on Amazon EC2 and GPU instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.