Google Launches Bare-Metal Cloud GPUs for Machine Learning Data Center Knowledge

Google has rolled out in beta a new cloud service that allows users to rent Nvidia GPUs running in Google data centers for machine learning and other compute-heavy workloads. While relatively few companies outside of a small group of web giants like Google itself use machine learning in production, there's a lot of development work going on in the field, with computer scientists building and training machine learning algorithms and companies mulling various business cases for using the capability. Training these systems requires a lot of computational horsepower, and at least today companies have found that harnessing the power of many GPUs working in parallel is the best way to get that horsepower. The problem is that building, powering, and cooling a GPU cluster is far from trivial – not to mention expensive – which makes renting one an attractive option, especially at the experimental stage, where most companies are with machine learning. It's a business opportunity for cloud providers, who already have experience with this kind of infrastructure and the resources to offer it as a service.