Oracle is set to be the ‘first major cloud provider’ to make NVIDIA A100 GPUs, the world’s most powerful GPU, generally available on bare metal instances.
Developers and data scientists will reportedly be able to boost artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and machine learning by up to six times faster than previous GPUs at a lower cost.
Unlocking valuable data
“The costs of machine learning are not just on the hardware side. It’s also about how quickly someone can get spun up with the right tools, and how quickly they can get access to the right software,” said Clay Magouyrk, the Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Since its inception, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has standardised on NVIDIA’s GPUs, beginning with the Pascal generation in 2016, moving to Volta and now with Ampere.
“Everything is pre-tuned on these instances so that anybody can show up, rent these GPUs by the hour and get quickly started running machine learning on Oracle Cloud,” added Mr. Magouyrk
The new A100 GPU is said to help enterprises unlock more value from their data and innovate faster, enabling important breakthroughs such as testing and developing new medications, building safer airplanes, and quickly sourcing natural resources.
“Our customers demand the best of on-premises with all the benefits of the cloud, which is what we’re delivering with our latest GPU instance running on NVIDIA’s latest A100 GPU,” said Karan Batta, the Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
For the first time, customers of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be able to run complex HPC applications using GPUDirect over NVIDIA Mellanox RDMA networking, which enables clusters of thousands of GPUs, connected with microsecond latency, to deliver massive computational power on-demand.
“We have the largest, most performant, and most cost effective A100 offering in the cloud because we offer double the memory and more local storage than competitors,” added Mr. Batta.
The new bare metal instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will feature eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs with 40 GB of memory each, all interconnected via NVIDIA NVLink. The CPU on the server also has 64 physical cores of AMD Rome processors, running at 2.9 GHz and supported by 2,048 GB of RAM as well as 24 TB of NVMe storage.
“This is the GPU instance customers have been waiting for to move to the cloud and deliver important breakthroughs,” said Mr. Batta.
In total, Oracle will offer the ability to scale to more than 500 GPUs interconnected with Mellanox networking when using the new NVIDIA solution to power the most demanding applications.
“Accelerated computing is essential to driving research breakthroughs for enterprises across all industries,” said Ian Buck, the General Manager and Vice President of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA.
In addition to the bare metal instance, organisations will be able to deploy up to four GPUs per virtual machine.
“By bringing the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs into its cloud service, Oracle is providing the computing performance needed to accelerate the most critical work being done today in AI and high performance computing,” added Mr. Buck.
Oracle will also be adding A100 to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science platform and providing NVIDIA Deep Neural Network libraries through Oracle Cloud Marketplace to help data scientists run common machine learning and deep learning frameworks.
“We’re going to be able to take this data with no friction at all, run it on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, conduct data analytics and create data frames that are used for machine learning to learn how to create a predictive model,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
“That model will recommend actions to help companies go faster and make smarter decisions at an unparalleled scale,” he added.
On top of integrating the new NVIDIA GPU, Oracle also announced images, solution stacks, and services that expand users’ ability to extract value from their data. These include AI Engineered MLOps Solution Stack, Media Ops Packaged Solution Stacks, Cloud Native MLOps Orchestration Package, Julia AI HPC Image and Pre-configured Data Science and AI Image.
The rise of AI
These announcements come at a time when AI and ML adoption is rising and becoming more commercially accessible, thus reshaping markets.
“Replicating the human voice with AI is highly dependent on processing power and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers that with the new NVIDIA A100 GPU,” said Kerem Sozugecer, the Co-Founder and CTO at DeepZen Limited who produce digital voice solutions for audiobooks, advertising, marketing, brand voices and other types of voice content, including podcasting, gaming and virtual assistants.
With the NVIDIA GPU deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, DeepZen was able to see a performance increase of 37%, enabling them to scale their business.
The new GPUs are also useful in processing graphics for advanced video analytics.
“The amount of streaming video data being created is growing exponentially. To deliver real-time analytics and insights demands the highest level of graphics processing units,” said Amro Shihadah, the Founder and COO of IDenTV who provide advanced video analytics based on AI capabilities powered by computer vision, automated speech recognition and textual semantic classifiers.
They also saw a marked increase of 35% performance after deploying NVIDIA’s A100 GPU on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Back in May of 2020, VinAI Research, VinGroup’s AI research arm, also became the ‘first in Southeast Asia’ to deploy the newly-launched NVIDIA DGX A100 data center solution in an effort to scale up their workloads.
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