DALLAS, Tex., May 20 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) has become the first company to offer the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU accelerator in the cloud, giving companies of all sizes easier and more affordable access to the latest virtual desktop applications with no compromise to performance.

IBM continues to be in lock step with NVIDIA in bringing its latest GPU technology to the cloud. The Tesla M60 joins other NVIDIA GPU offerings on IBM Cloud, including the Tesla K80 and Tesla K10 GPUs, which accelerate deep learning, data analytics and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

By adding Tesla M60 GPU accelerators to other NVIDIA GPU offerings on IBM Cloud, customers can deploy fewer, more powerful cloud servers while churning through complex jobs faster. They can speed through a range of compute-intensive workloads, including data analytics, graphics, energy exploration and deep learning/artificial intelligence. IBM is once again among the first to market in bringing the latest NVIDIA GPU technology to the cloud, which is driving the next wave of innovation and real-time collaboration across a wide gamut of industries including healthcare and financial services, oil and gas exploration, media, architectural, engineering and construction.

The Tesla M60 with NVIDIA GRID virtualization technology helps accelerate virtualized desktop applications, especially in the area of CAD/CAM (computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing) including AutoCAD. Companies can spin up these GPU resources on IBM Cloud on an on-demand basis to help cut their processing time from days (or weeks) to down to hours, compared to using CPU-only based servers.

“With NVIDIA GPU technology on IBM Cloud, we are one step closer to offering supercomputing performance on a pay-as-you-go basis, which makes this new approach to tackling big data problems accessible to customers of all sizes,” says Jerry Gutierrez, HPC leader for SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “We’re at an inflection point in our industry, where GPU technology is opening the door for the next wave of breakthroughs across multiple industries.”

“IBM and NVIDIA have a history of leadership in providing world-class computing capabilities from the IBM Cloud,” said Jim McHugh, vice president and general manager at NVIDIA. “For the first time, businesses can deliver workstation-class graphics-intensive applications from the cloud along with high performance computing.”

GPUs work in conjunction with a server’s CPU to accelerate application performance. The CPU offloads compute-intensive portions of the application to the GPU, which processes large blocks of data at one time rather than sequentially boosting the overall performance in a server environment. GPUs, accelerate more than 400 scientific, engineering, deep learning, data analytics and other HPC applications, are better for high performance computing than CPUs alone because of the thousands of efficient, high-performance cores designed to process information faster.

This performance boost has allowed IBM Cloud clients like MapD to achieve groundbreaking results. By using IBM Cloud bare metal servers infused with NVIDIA GPU technology, MapD has created a super-high-speed database and visualization platform that filters and correlates multiple dimensions of multi-billion row datasets in milliseconds, without lag.

MapD Enables Lightning-Fast Data Exploration 

With a mission to make big data exploration visually interactive and insightful, MapD uses NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU accelerators running on SoftLayer bare metal servers to build its super-high-speed database and visualization platform. The massive bandwidth and parallelism delivered by NVIDIA GPUs enable the MapD database to filter and correlate multiple dimensions of multi-billion row datasets in milliseconds, without lag.

“Today, everyone is being inundated and overwhelmed by data and today’s database systems are simply to slow to handle it,” says Todd Mostak, CEO and founder of MapD. “Imagine harnessing the parallel processing power of GPU acceleration for a big data platform that can deliver up to a 100x performance increase—all via the global IBM Cloud. This is what we’ve done with MapD, a platform that can perform massive calculations in real-time and provide visualization tools for decision makers to gain instant insights and context from their data, regardless of a user’s location.”

MapD analyzes multi-billion row datasets in just milliseconds, but lightning speed is only part of the equation. By harnessing the power of GPU acceleration in the scalable cloud, MapD is also able offer this supercomputing performance on a pay-as-you-go basis, which makes this new approach to tackling big data problems accessible to customers of all sizes. Furthermore, the MapD platform can be deployed in public or private cloud, in virtualized environments, on-premise and in combinations of any of these scenarios.

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Source: IBM