Peer1 powers up UK-based GPU cloud

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jack Clark.

Peer1 Hosting has launched a GPU-backed cloud service designed for high performance computing workloads.

The HPC Self Serve Cloud became available to buy on Tuesday, Peer1 announced at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London. It has enough scalability to let customers provision up to 50 physical servers in 15 minutes and gives them the option of using Nvidia GPUs.

When asked why a company would go for Peer1 rather than cloud king Amazon Web Services which launched its GPU service in 2010, Mike Bainbridge, a solutions engineer for Peer1, told ZDNet UK he thought the company was "a lot more flexible" and noted that Peer1 is in talks with a major UK university to run chemistry analysis workloads on its cloud…

Because Peer1 has "good connections" with Nvidia it can put customers in touch with experts from Nvidia to help tweak programs and make sure that they get the most out of the Nvidia GPUs.

Furthermore, customers that deal with customer or medical records that need to be UK-based can still access the cloud as it has a UK datacentre in Portsmouth, he said. Amazon, by comparison, has datacentres in Ireland.