Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has become the first to offer general availability of bare-metal instances featuring the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU.

These GPU instances will enable customers in industries such as automotive and aerospace to run complex, data-intensive, high-performance applications like modeling and simulations more cost efficiently.

Powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can run complex AI models and deep learning systems between two-and-a-half and six times faster than instances featuring previous generations of GPUs.

The new A100 GPU can help enterprises unlock more value from their data and innovate faster, enabling important breakthroughs such as testing and developing new medications, building safer airplanes, and quickly sourcing natural resources.

Customers can also complex HPC applications using GPUDirect over NVIDIA Mellanox RDMA networking, which enables clusters of thousands of GPUs, connected with microsecond latency, to deliver massive computational power on-demand.

“Since its inception, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has standardised on NVIDIA’s GPUs, beginning with the Pascal generation, moving to Volta and now with Ampere. Our customers demand the best of on-premises with all the benefits of the cloud, which is what we’re delivering with our latest GPU instance running on NVIDIA’s latest A100 GPU,” said Karan Batta, Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Uncovering new business opportunities

Hundreds of thousands of enterprises store their data in Oracle databases. All of that raw data is ripe for AI analysis with A100 instances running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to help them uncover new business opportunities, understand customer sentiment and create products.

“We’re going to be able to take this data with no friction at all, run it on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, conduct data analytics and create data frames that are used for machine learning to learn how to create a predictive model. That model will recommend actions to help companies go faster and make smarter decisions at an unparalleled scale,” said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

The new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare-metal BM.GPU4.8 instance offers eight 40GB NVIDIA A100 GPUs linked via high-speed NVIDIA NVLink direct GPU-to-GPU interconnects.

With A100, the world’s most powerful GPU, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instance delivers performance gains of up to six times for customers running diverse AI workloads across training, inference and data science.

To power the most demanding applications, the new instance can also scale up with NVIDIA Mellanox networking to provide more than 500 A100 GPUs in a single instance.

NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The new bare metal instance, GPU4.8, features eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs with 40 GB of memory each, all interconnected via NVIDIA NVLink™. The CPU on board has 64 physical cores of AMD Rome processors running at 2.9 GHz supported by 2,048 GB of RAM and 24 TB of NVMe storage. Oracle’s new bare metal GPU instance joins the high-speed, low-latency Cluster Network architecture, enabling customers to scale to 500+ GPU clusters with NVIDIA Mellanox RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for large-scale distributed workloads requiring RDMA and providing up to 1.6 TB of bandwidth per bare-metal node.

In addition to the bare metal instance, organizations will be able to deploy one, two, or four GPUs per virtual machine in the coming months. These instance shapes will also give customers access to all the existing toolsets, like pre-configured Data Science VMs optimized for GPUs, to run any HPC or deep learning containers from NVIDIA NGC, a hub of cloud-native, GPU-optimized containers, models and industry-specific SDKs.