SoftLayer Rolls Out GPU-Powered HPC Cloud

By Tiffany Trader

April 17, 2012

The short-list of true HPC cloud providers just got a little longer. Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor SoftLayer has added high-end NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to its line of dedicated servers. According to the company, use cases include computation-intensive projects such as data mining, numerical and seismic analysis as well as video processing and 3D rendering.

SoftLayer full server rowAs with all the company’s offerings, the HPC servers will be available in a range of configurations. As a point of reference, for $879.00 per-month, users will get the entry level model, an Intel Xeon E5-2620 Sandy Bridge-based server outfitted with one GPU, 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage.

SoftLayer, which opened for business in early 2006, claims to be the largest privately-held Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider in the world with over 100,000 servers located in datacenters spanning North America, Europe and Asia. While the company already has 25,000 customers ranging from technology startups to global corporations, the HPC offering should help extend its reach even further.

SoftLayer’s product line can be categorized into three main solution types, dedicated, aka “bare metal,” servers with an operating system on-board (this includes the new HPC server offering), dedicated servers running a hypervisor for customers who prefer to manage their own virtual machines, and the CloudLayer Service for customers who want virtual machines in the cloud.

Customers take care of self-provisioning and self-management. This means they use either online ordering or connect with a sales rep to order customized hardware or virtual machine solutions. For example, if the customer is ordering a dedicated server, they’ll need to select the server configuration, the operating system, the type of hard drive, amount of RAM, and whether they want 10Gig or 1Gig server connections. There are a lot of options to choose from and the company says this helps distinguish it from the competition.

Of course, the big news here is that customers can now specify that they want a dedicated server with NVIDIA Tesla M2090 chips, which have the power to accelerate HPC workloads by up to 10x. SoftLayer’s HPC offering comprises dual-processor Intel E5-2600 Sandy Bridge-based servers supporting one or two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs. This best-in-class NVIDIA GPU delivers up to 665 gigaflops of double precision performance, 1.3 teraflops of single precision performance, ECC memory error protection, and L1 and L2 caches.

On the CPU side, Intel’s E5-2600 product family supports up to 8 cores per processor. Customers can select from the E5-2620, starting at $879, the E5-2650, starting at $1029, and the E5-2690, starting at $1179. Since this is an IaaS offering, support will naturally be limited to the network, the power, and the hardware, while software-level support will be up to the customers.

According to SoftLayer Chief Scientist Nathan Day, initial customer activity has come primarily from the oil and gas industry for companies that need to run seismic data workloads. The cloud provider is also seeing interest from the entertainment/media sector and content creators who use graphics processors for what they were originally designed, graphics processing. The science verticals tend to be the typical large HPC user, while on the entertainment and social media side, companies tend to be of the small-to-mid-size variety, or as Day puts it, “they are technically small businesses that are acting like like large enterprises in terms of their IT needs.”

Day expects that the hybrid HPC offering will pull in a lot of customers who need the power of GPUs to run their workloads. To that end, the use case is any application that can take advantage of the GPU. Likely candidates will come from the scientific, number-crunching domain, or the graphics processing, video transcoding, and content creation arena, Day says.

When asked what sets apart their offering from others in the space, Day was quick to point out the benefits of a bare metal solution for HPC users. “So they don’t have to pay the hypervisor tax,” he comments. While Day credits Amazon Web Services with helping to popularize cloud computing, he notes that Amazon only offers virtual cycles; it does not provide the raw access to hardware of a dedicated solution.

Another plus for customers, Day says, is SoftLayer’s wide variety of offerings and configurations. He also mentions the company’s global reach. Datacenter facilities in Dallas, Seattle, Washington DC, Houston, San Jose, Amsterdam, and Singapore are all integrated into the SoftLayer network, which provides customers with over 2,000 Gbps of connectivity between 13 datacenters and 16 points of presence (PoPs). Additional PoPs include Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Miami, London and Frankfurt. The geographically-dispersed approach was designed to bring connectivity closer to the user, which brings us to our next topic, latency.

It’s no surprise that HPC usually entails substantial data sets. Day says that it’s common to see data sets on the order of hundreds of GBs, which need to be moved into the cloud for processing. While SoftLayer’s robust network helps address latency concerns, it often makes more sense to transfer the data on a hard drive rather than deal with long upload times. For customers that are set up to perform deltas from the initial datasets, it’s mainly the initial setup that presents a challenge. Regardless, Day says it’s relatively easy to ship the data if necessary, which is exactly what their first HPC customer did. Subsequent customers are still doing calculations on how long the data transfer will take.

When asked the pivotal cloud question, why is it better to rent versus buy, Day responded that he expects to see a lot of project use initially as people start adapting to the model. “It’s certainly easier to come to SoftLayer and get a fleet of servers with GPUs for a few months than it is that go purchase them outright, put them in a datacenter and pay for all the care and feeding that goes along with having servers in the datacenter,” he says, adding the well-known cloud adage: “it basically takes what was a capital expense and makes it an operational expense to get the compute power to handle these workloads.”

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

Nvidia Appoints Andy Grant as EMEA Director of Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI

March 22, 2024

Nvidia recently appointed Andy Grant as Director, Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). With over 25 years of high-performance computing (HPC) experience, Grant brings a Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire