AWS 3D graphics instances come to Sydney

Amazon Web Services today announced the availability of the graphics oriented Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G2 instance served from its Sydney facility.

NVIDIA K2 GRID GPU. Source: vendor.

Called g2.2xlarge, the instances feature eight virtual processors based on Intel's Xeon E5-2670 Sandy Bridge CPUs with 15 GiB of memory each; they are backed by 60GB of solid state disc storage.

The G2 service can be used for streaming games, video encoding and rendering, data visualisation, computer-assisted design and draughting, accelerated desktop as a service applications, image processing and 3D graphics workloads.

The graphics heavy lifting is done by NVIDIA's GRID processors built on the company's Kepler architecture. 

Each instance gets a GRID processor with 4GB RAM, 1,536 CUDA parallel cores and hardware accelerated video encoding.

According to Amazon, this is enough for up to eight real-time high definition video streams at 720p resolution and thirty frames per second, or four 1080p streams at the same frame rate.

Australian pricing for the g2.2xlarge is A$0.898 per hour. American AWS regions charge A$0.7025 per hour for g2.2xlarge in comparison.

G2 was launched by AWS in November last year, served from the company's Irish and US facilities.