Amazon's new GPU-cloud wants to chew through your AI and big data projects ZDNet

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled a new GPU-powered cloud computing service for artificial intelligence, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and other applications that need vast amounts of parallel processing power. AWS said its P2 instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) are aimed at applications that require "massive parallel floating point performance" . "These instances were designed to chew through tough, large-scale machine learning, deep learning, computational fluid dynamics, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and computational finance workloads," said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS. While GPUs were first associated with gaming, they're now finding a new life in dealing with huge computing workloads, as they can be scaled out so that banks of GPUs handle tasks in parallel. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of scaling up, where increasingly complex problems were tackled using individual machines with ever faster CPUs, which is becoming increasingly hard to do.