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Google Cloud Will Add GPU Services in Early 2017 (geekwire.com)

Posted by msmash on from the finally dept.

Google Cloud will add GPUs as a service early next year, the company has said. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM's Bluemix all already offer GPU as a service. From a report on GeekWire: Google may be seeking to distinguish itself, however, with the variety of GPUs it's offering. They include the AMD FirePro S9300 x2 and two offerings from NVIDIA Tesla: the P100 and the K80. And Google will charge by the minute, not by the hour, making GPU usage more affordable for customers needing it only for short periods. CPU-based machines in the cloud are good for general-purpose computing, but certain tasks such as rendering or large-scale simulations are much faster on specialized processors, Google explained. GPUs contain hundreds of times as many computational cores as CPUs and excel at performing risk analysis, studying molecular binding or optimizing the shape of a turbine blade. Google's GPU services will be available in early 2017 through Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Machine Learning.

5 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. Excellent by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    This can be used for bitcoin mining and "deep learning" or possibly "deep learning about bitcoin mining". All I need is some VC backing.

    1. Re:Excellent by lgw · · Score: 2

      Naturally, the slashvertizement for Google cloud doesn't mention that AWS has had GPU instances for years. Azure seems to have had it for a year now. Google is really playing catch-up in cloud services (though they aren't a joke like Oracle).

      I hope Whipslash got a check for this slashvertizement - be good to see some advertizement flowing out of Goggle for once (and anything that keeps /. afloat).

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Excellent by BronsCon · · Score: 2

      Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM's Bluemix all already offer GPU as a service.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    3. Re:Excellent by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

      This can be used for bitcoin mining

      Nope. You cannot mine bitcoins profitably with a GPU. Not even FPGAs are sufficient. You need ASICs.

      A GPU can give you a few mega-hashes per joule. An FPGA can do about 20 MH/j. The best ASICs can do about 10,000. It is not even close.

      Mining hardware comparison.

  2. Cost? by Visarga · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What counts is price and performance. Is there a comparison to other offers?