Oracle has announced the general availability of new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute options to provide customers with high compute performance based on its recently announced X7 hardware.
Newly enhanced virtual machine (VM) and bare metal compute, and new bare metal graphical processing unit (GPU) instances enable customers to run even nfrastructure-heavy workloads such as high-performance computing (HPC), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) faster and more cost-effectively, according to the company.
Unlike competitive offerings, Oracle says, its Cloud Infrastructure is built to meet the unique requirements of enterprises, offering predictable performance for enterprise applications while bringing cost efficiency to HPC use cases. According to Oracle, it delivers 1,214% better storage performance at 88% lower cost per input/output operation (IO).
All of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s new compute instances leverage Intel’s latest Xeon processors based on the Skylake architecture. Oracle’s accelerated bare metal shapes are also powered by NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, based on the Pascal architecture. Providing 28 cores, dual 25Gb network interfaces for high-bandwidth requirements and over 18 TFLOPS of single-precision performance per instance, these GPU instances accelerate computation-heavy use cases such as reservoir modeling, AI, and deep learning.
Oracle also plans to release NVIDIA Volta architecture-powered instances with 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs interconnected via NVIDIA NVLINK to generate over 125 TFLOPS of single-precision performance. Unlike the competition, Oracle says it will offer these GPUs as both virtual machines and bare metal instances. Oracle will also provide pre-configured images for fast deployment of use cases such as AI. Customers can also leverage TensorFlow or Caffe toolkits to accelerate HPC and deep learning use cases.
In addition, Oracle’s new VM standard shape is now available in 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 24 cores, while the bare metal standard shape offers 52 cores, the highest Intel Skylake-based CPU count per instance of any cloud vendor. Combined with its high-scale storage capacity, supporting up to 512TB of non-volatile memory express (NVMe) solid state drive (SSD) remote block volumes, the company says, these instances are well-suited for traditional enterprise applications that require predictable storage performance.
The Dense I/O shapes are also available in both VM and bare metal instances and are optimal for HPC, database applications, and big data workloads. The bare metal Dense I/O shape is capable of over 3.9 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) for write operations. It also includes 51TB of local NVMe SSD storage, offering 237% more capacity than competing solutions.
Finally, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has simplified management of virtual machines by offering a Terraform provider for single-click deployment of single or multiple compute instances for clustering. In addition, a Terraform-based Kubernetes installer is available for deployment of highly available, containerized applications.