IBM Cloud Delivers Supercomputing Power to Fuel Innovation

Dallas - 08 Jul 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) is now offering NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 dual-GPU accelerators on bare metal cloud servers. With the new offering, IBM Cloud is bringing high-speed performance to the SoftLayer cloud infrastructure, enabling companies to build supercomputing clusters without having to expand their existing technology infrastructure.

By offering NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 dual-GPU accelerators on bare metal servers, IBM Cloud is bringing high-speed performance to the SoftLayer cloud infrastructure, enabling companies to build supercomputing clusters without having to expand their existing technology infrastructure. (Image Courtesy NVIDIA)

In addition to bringing SoftLayer supercomputing capabilities to the enterprise, this new cloud GPU capability is especially important for startups and research facilities, which typically start small, using only a few machines and GPU accelerators for testing and development workloads. With the Tesla K80 PGU accelerators, IBM Cloud provides a scalable supercomputing option that supports discovery and insight for customers in a variety of industries, including genomics, data analysis, machine learning and deep learning.

IBM Cloud is already the only cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider to offer GPU-accelerated computing on bare metal servers. And it is now the only IaaS provider to offer customers Tesla K80 GPU accelerators in the cloud. By providing such capabilities in the cloud, IBM gives companies of all sizes easier and more affordable access to supercomputing resources.

Customers already seeing value:

• New York University (NYU) recently used NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU accelerators on IBM Cloud to support a deep-learning course.
• Startup MapD uses Tesla K80 accelerators on IBM Cloud for data and analytics. The solution enables multiple users to query and visualize multibillion row data sets with latencies measured in milliseconds, achieving orders-of-magnitude increases in speed over other solutions.
• Artomatix uses Tesla K80 accelerators on IBM Cloud to apply machine-learning and big-data concepts to art creation, enabling computers to manage many tedious and time-consuming aspects of the process and allowing artists to focus on creating more dynamic games and films. The Artomatix platform enables a single artist to do the work of a team, disrupting traditional art and animation workflows in the video game and movie industries.

These customers achieved their results by coupling IBM Cloud with the Tesla K80’s dual-GPU architecture, which includes a large memory that provides more teraflops of double-precision computing performance and gigabytes of memory in a single server to accelerate compute-intensive workloads—delivering 10 times higher performance than today’s fastest CPU.

“The Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform is used by researchers and data scientists around the world to drive innovation and scientific discovery,” said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “With the addition of Tesla K80 GPUs, SoftLayer’s unique cloud offering for HPC will dramatically expand access to supercomputing-class performance, accelerating the pace of important new advances.”

The Tesla K80 GPU accelerator joins IBM Cloud’s other NVIDIA GPU offerings, which include the NVIDIA GRID™ K2 and Tesla K10 GPUs.

“Our global network of data centers, connectivity features, bare metal servers, and GPU offerings meet the rigorous requirements of most supercomputing workloads,” said Marc Jones, CTO for SoftLayer, an IBM company. “By introducing the K80 accelerator on IBM Cloud, we’re giving our customers an even more powerful tool to run demanding applications.”

For more on IBM Cloud’s GPU offerings on SoftLayer, go to www.softlayer.com/gpu. To learn more about how SoftLayer enables HPC in the cloud, please visit www.softlayer.com/info/high-performance-computing.

IBM total cloud revenue – covering public, private and hybrid engagements – was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015. IBM’s cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes IaaS.[

Customer Quotes:

“Students in our course were assigned to teams that used the Tesla K80 nodes on the SoftLayer infrastructure to complete deep-learning course work, assignments, and projects.”

Christian Puhrsch, former section leader at NYU

“While we offer on-premises appliance solutions, having a cloud GPU offering on SoftLayer is a perfect way to deploy to customers who would rather use MapD on a subscription basis or ‘try before they buy.’ The fact that IBM Cloud offers SoftLayer bare metal GPU servers dovetails perfectly with our focus on overwhelming performance, as virtualization can increase query latencies.”

Todd Mostak, founder and CEO of MapD

“We leverage the latest NVIDIA GPUs by repurposing them to work as supercomputers on IBM Cloud, which makes it feasible to do in seconds what would otherwise take hours or even days to do on standard hardware. By automating the generation of art on the SoftLayer platform, Artomatix enables digital graphic artists to focus on being creative, in addition to reducing project times and costs.”

Neal O’Gorman, founder and CEO of Artomatix