Elastic GPU Service:What is Elastic GPU Service?

Benefits

Elastic GPU Service provides GPU-accelerated instances that are used as computing servers based on GPUs and CPUs. GPUs provide unique benefits in performing complex mathematical and geometric calculations. In specific scenarios such as floating-point and parallel computing, GPUs can provide 100 times the computing power of their CPU counterparts. GPUs support the following features:

• Have a large number of arithmetic logic units (ALUs) that can be used for large-scale parallel computing.

• Support high-throughput scenarios in which multiple threads run in parallel to process computing tasks.

• Have simple logic control units (LCUs).

The following table compares GPU-accelerated instances that are provided by Elastic GPU Service and self-managed GPU-accelerated servers.

GPU-accelerated instance families

An instance is the minimum unit that provides computing service for your business. The computing capability of an instance varies based on the instance type. Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides a variety of instance families for different business scenarios and use cases. GPU-accelerated instances are a type of ECS instances. You can use GPU-accelerated instances in the same manner as common ECS instances. In addition, GPU-accelerated instances provide GPU acceleration capabilities. To create GPU-accelerated instances, you must select instance types from instance families of the enterprise-level heterogeneous computing, ECS Bare Metal Instance, or Super Computing Cluster (SCC) category. For more information about instance types, see Overview of instance families.

Benefits

• Extensive service coverage

  Elastic GPU Service supports large-scale deployment in 17 regions around the world. Elastic GPU Service also provides flexible delivery methods such as auto provisioning and auto scaling to meet the sudden demands of your business.

• Superior computing power

  Elastic GPU Service provides GPUs that have superior computing power. When you use Elastic GPU Service together with a high-performance CPU platform, a GPU-accelerated instance can provide mixed-precision computing performance of up to 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS).

• Superior network performance

  GPU-accelerated instances use virtual private clouds (VPCs) that support up to 4.5 million packets per second (Mpps) and 32 Gbit/s of internal bandwidth. You can use GPU-accelerated instances together with SCC to provide a remote direct memory access (RDMA) network that has up to 50 Gbit/s of bandwidth between nodes. This allows you to meet the low-latency and high-bandwidth requirements when data is transmitted between nodes.

• Flexible purchase methods

  Elastic GPU Service supports various billing methods, such as the subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods, preemptible instances, reserved instances, and storage capacity units (SCUs). To prevent inefficient use of resources, select a billing method based on your business requirements.

  Note

  You cannot purchase reserved instances for specific GPU-accelerated instance families. For more information, see Attributes.

Alibaba Cloud also provides DeepGPU that you can use together with Elastic GPU Service. DeepGPU provides enhanced GPU computing capabilities and can help you manage Alibaba Cloud resources in a more convenient and efficient manner. For more information, see DeepGPU.

Billing

You are charged for Elastic GPU Service resources in the same manner as ECS resources. The billable resources in Elastic GPU Service include computing resources (vCPUs, GPUs, and memory), images, Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices, public bandwidth, and snapshots.

For more information about the billing, see Billing for Elastic GPU Service.

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