(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Offering new levels of performance and flexibility for complex computations and video compression, hosting provider PEER 1 Hosting (www.peer1.com) has announced the availability of the industry’s first large-scale, hosted graphics processing unit cloud.
According to PEER 1 Hosting’s announcement made at the 37th Annual Siggraph International Conference, its GPU Cloud runs on the RealityServer 3D Web application service platform, developed by mental images, the high-end rendering software division of GPU developer NVIDIA (www.nvidia.com), providing a powerful combination of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and 3D Web services software.
“With their commitment to best-in-breed technology and state-of-the-art data centers, PEER 1 Hosting has all the skills to deliver a service of this kind and make the power of the GPU more accessible than ever before,” NVIDIA Tesla product line manager Sumit Gupta said in a statement. “RealityServer running on PEER 1 Hosting’s GPU Cloud will enable software developers of other Web 2.0 websites to offer 3D Web applications, making the consumer experience on the Internet even more interactive.”
The RealityServer platform delivers interactive and photorealistic applications over the Web using the iray renderer, which enables animators, product designers, architects and consumers to easily visualize 3D scenes with remarkable realism. RealityServer hosted software can also be used by developers for Facebook, MySpace, and other Web 2.0 websites to offer 3D Web applications and games, making the consumer experience on the Internet even more interactive.
Massively parallel NVIDIA Tesla GPUs let PEER 1 Hosting offer customers a flexible and reliable system capable of delivering high computational performance across demanding applications. These include graphics rendering, complex quantitative processing, video compression, and large-model 3D Web services for access by mobile clients.
Hosting the GPUs and software within the cloud simplifies customer implementation and provides an inexpensive entry point for new users, as well as minimizing internal IT pressures so businesses can focus on their core business operations.
PEER 1 Hosting is currently offering two GPU Cloud Computing plans: the NVIDIA’s Tesla S1070 and the Tesla M2050. The Tesla S1070 1U Computing System speeds the transition to energy-efficient parallel computing with the world’s first teraflop many-core processor. Additionally, its scalability can solve computing challenges quickly and accurately. The Tesla M2050/M2070 GPU-powered NVIDIA partner solutions deliver supercomputing power at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power consumption, according to PEER 1 Hosting, and provide the world’s highest compute density for departmental clusters and data center deployments.
NVIDIA’s Tesla S1070 and Tesla M2050 (Fermi architecture-based) hosted GPUs, as well as RealityServer are now available for purchase worldwide and will be hosted as a managed hosting offering at PEER 1 Hosting data centers in Toronto, Canada and London, UK.
“We’re excited to support and deliver high performance hosted GPUs from NVIDIA to our customers,” PEER 1 Hosting managing director Dominic Monkhouse said in a statement. “The combination of the high performing GPUs running on our robust SuperNetwork, with the on demand flexibility of the cloud, is truly an industry first.”
PEER 1 Hosting has been rapidly expanding for the past few months, most recently with the availability of its ServerBeach hosting services in Canada, marking the first time PEER 1 Hosting will be providing all three hosting services — managed hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation — in Canada. Also, earlier this year, PEER 1 Hosting opened its flagship $40 million data center in Canada’s most populous city, Toronto.
