The service will support computational and visualisation intensive workloads for UKCloud’s UK public sector and healthcare customers.
Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud commented, “The public sector is driving more complex computational and visualisation intensive workloads than ever before, not only for CAD development packages, but also for tasks like the simulation of infrastructure changes in transport, for genetic sequencing in health or for battlefield simulation in defence. In response to this demand, we have a greater focus on emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Many of today’s modern applications, especially in fields such as medical imaging or graphical analytics, need an NVIDIA GPU to power them, whether they are running on a laptop or desktop, on a departmental server or on the cloud. Just as organisations are finding that their critical business applications can be run more securely and efficiently in the cloud, so too they are realising that it makes sense to host graphical and visualisation intensive workloads there as well.
One comment came from a UKCloud partner with many clients needing GPU capability: “One of our applications includes 3D functionality which requires a graphics card. We have several customers who might be interested in a hosted solution but would require access to this functionality. To this end it would be helpful if UKCloud were able to offer us a solution which included a GPU.”
Listening to its clients in this way and acting on their suggestions to improve its service by implementing NVIDIA GPU technology was one of a number of initiatives that enabled UKCloud to win a 2017 UK Customer Experience Award for putting customers at the heart of everything, through the use of technology.
“The availability of NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud means businesses can capitalise on virtualisation without compromising the functionality and responsiveness of their critical applications,” added Bart Schneider, Senior Director of CSP EMEA at NVIDIA. “Even customers running graphically complex or compute-intensive applications can benefit from rapid turn-up, service elasticity and cloud-economics.”
UKCloud’s GPU-accelerated cloud service, branded as Cloud GPU, is available in two versions: Compute and Visualisation. Both are based on NVIDIA GPUs and initially available only on UKCloud’s Enterprise Compute Cloud platform. They will be made available on UKCloud’s other platforms at a later date.