AWS Outposts Station a GPU Garrison in Your Data Center

NVIDIA T4 GPUs now power hybrid AWS clouds for AI, IoT and graphics
by Justin Boitano

All the goodness of GPU acceleration on Amazon Web Services can now also run inside your own data center.

AWS Outposts powered by NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs are generally available starting today. They bring cloud-based Amazon EC2 G4 instances inside your data center to meet user requirements for security and latency in a wide variety of AI and graphics applications.

With this new offering, AI is no longer a research project.

Most companies still keep their data inside their own walls because they see it as their core intellectual property. But for deep learning to transition from research into production, enterprises need the flexibility and ease of development the cloud offers — right beside their data. That’s a big part of what AWS Outposts with T4 GPUs now enables.

With this new offering, enterprises can install a fully managed rack-scale appliance next to the large data lakes stored securely in their data centers.

AI Acceleration Across the Enterprise

To train neural networks, every layer of software needs to be optimized, from NVIDIA drivers to container runtimes and application frameworks. AWS services like Sagemaker, Elastic MapReduce and many others designed on custom-built Amazon Machine Images require model development to start with the training on large datasets. With the introduction of NVIDIA-powered AWS Outposts, those services can now be run securely in enterprise data centers.

The GPUs in Outposts accelerate deep learning as well as high performance computing and other GPU applications. They all can access software in NGC, NVIDIA’s hub for GPU-accelerated software optimization, which is stocked with applications, frameworks, libraries and SDKs that include pre-trained models.

For AI inference, the NVIDIA EGX edge-computing platform also runs on AWS Outposts and works with the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service. Backed by the power of NVIDIA T4 GPUs, these services are capable of processing orders of magnitudes more information than CPUs alone. They can quickly derive insights from vast amounts of data streamed in real time from sensors in an Internet of Things deployment whether it’s in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail or any other industry.

On top of EGX, the NVIDIA Metropolis application framework provides building blocks for vision AI, geared for use in smart cities, retail, logistics and industrial inspection, as well as other AI and IoT use cases, now easily delivered on AWS Outposts.

Alternatively, the NVIDIA Clara application framework is tuned to bring AI to healthcare providers whether it’s for medical imaging, federated learning or AI-assisted data labeling.

The T4 GPU’s Turing architecture uses TensorRT to accelerate the industry’s widest set of AI models. Its Tensor Cores support multi-precision computing that delivers up to 40x more inference performance than CPUs.

Remote Graphics, Locally Hosted

Users of high-end graphics have choices, too. Remote designers, artists and technical professionals who need to access large datasets and models can now get both cloud convenience and GPU performance.

Graphics professionals can benefit from the same NVIDIA Quadro technology that powers most of the world’s professional workstations not only on the public AWS cloud, but on their own internal cloud now with AWS Outposts packing T4 GPUs.

Whether they’re working locally or in the cloud, Quadro users can access the same set of hundreds of graphics-intensive, GPU-accelerated third-party applications.

The Quadro Virtual Workstation AMI, available in AWS Marketplace, includes the same Quadro driver found on physical workstations. It supports hundreds of Quadro-certified applications such as Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS and CATIA; Siemens NX; Autodesk AutoCAD and Maya; ESRI ArcGIS Pro; and ANSYS Fluent, Mechanical and Discovery Live.

Learn more about AWS and NVIDIA offerings and check out our booth 1237 and session talks at AWS re:Invent.