Pressing what it believes is an edge on the market for high-performance cloud computing platforms, Oracle Corp. is today unveiling a range of new products targeted at consumers seeking high-performance apps ranging from three-dimensional visualizations to video streaming.
The company is also launching a program that offers cloud computing to low-power Arm processors commonly used in handheld devices.
Oracle is also a long way behind the pioneer in cloud computing, although the company has made strides. Gartner Inc. recently wrote that Oracle has “made major year-over-year progress” and that its cloud company “is now well placed to manage massive lift-and-shift use scenarios” and hybrid workloads. The company has 25 regions worldwide and aims to expand to 35 by next year, said Karan Batta, vice president of product marketing for Oracle Cloud.
Oracle said today that it will sell its HPC compute instances based on Intel Corp.’s 10-nanometer “Ice Lake” processors by the beginning of next year, with hopes of providing a performance boost of more than 30% over the current X7 HPC model. Intel instances will be combined with 100-gigabit networking and sub-1.5 microsecond latency between nodes, allowing consumers to “collate a collection of resources as a single supercomputer,” Batta said.
Customers would have the option of installing both virtual or bare-metal instances with high-speed non-volatile memory express or NVMe capacity, and the ability to create clusters of instances using remote direct memory access. This technology allows nodes in a cluster to circumvent the operating system by directly accessing each other’s memory.
GPUs
Initially, instances would be available in the U.S., Europe / Middle East / Africa, and Japan / Asia / Pacific regions at an on-demand price of $3.05 per GPU per hour, which Oracle claimed will be lower than what rival cloud providers can charge for Nvidia’s older technologies.
Customers will supply up to 512 GPUs in a single cluster for large-scale machine learning algorithm testing, scientific computing, and cloud graphics workloads, along with more than 25 terabytes of local NVMe storage and 2 terabytes of memory.
The service is the result of a collaboration with Ampere Computing LLC, manufacturer of cloud server data center processors centered on a high-efficiency model architecture. Oracle said that the deal would have the highest performance relative to any other x86 per-core compute instance with order-of-magnitude cost savings. Batta said Arm services in the cloud are popular with clients developing edge computing or smartphone apps. Oracle courses several high-performance workloads that are only operating on-site for expense or efficiency reasons, Batta said. Despite its recent pledge to support Intel’s newest processors, Oracle continues to collaborate with Intel’s competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Earlier this year, the company revealed its E3 platform built on Epyc AMD processors.
The service is remarkable for giving consumers the option of having exactly the configuration of the system they require, rather than picking from a pallet of offers.
