Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of G3 instances, the next generation of GPU-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances designed to make it easy to procure a powerful combination of central processing (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM) for workloads such as 3D rendering, 3D visualizations, graphics-intensive remote workstations, video encoding, and virtual reality applications. Backed by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs, G3 instances offer double the CPU power per GPU, and double the host memory per GPU, than the most powerful GPU cloud instance available today.
Customers running complex modeling and 3D visualization analyses, such as medical image processing, computer-aided design, and seismic visualization jobs, require significant CPU processing power and memory. To offer the best performance for these graphics-intensive applications, the largest G3 instance offers twice the CPU power and eight times the host memory of the previous generation graphics instance (G2). The g3.16xlarge features four NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs with 64 CPUs using the latest custom Intel Xeon E5-2686v4 (Broadwell) processors, 488 GB of RAM, and Enhanced Networking using the Amazon EC2 Elastic Network Adaptor. The G3 instance also features two Amazon EC2 “firsts” to speed video frame processing and improve image fidelity for graphics workloads: support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual Workstation capabilities, including the ability to support four monitors with resolutions of up to 4K (4096 x 2160), and hardware encoding to support up to 10 H.265 (HEVC) 1080p30 streams per GPU.
Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2 said, “Today, AWS provides the broadest range of cloud instance types to support a wide variety of workloads. Customers have told us that having the ability to choose the right instance for the right workload enables them to operate more efficiently and go to market faster, which is why we continue to innovate to better support any workload.”
Customers can launch G3 instances using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, and third-party libraries. G3 instances are available in three instance sizes: g3.4xlarge, g3.8xlarge, and g3.16xlarge. G3 instances are available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), AWS GovCloud (US), and EU (Ireland), and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months.
