Oracle announced the general availability of a range of new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute options, providing customers with unparalleled compute performance based on Oracle’s 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 the most infrastructure-heavy workloads such as high-performance computing (HPC), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) faster and more cost-effectively.

Unlike competitive offerings, Oracle 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. Oracle delivers 1,214 percent better storage performance at 88 percent lower cost per input/output operation (IO)1.

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 soon 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 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.

“Only Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides the compute, storage, networking, and edge services necessary to deliver the end-to-end performance required of today’s modern enterprise,” said Kash Iftikhar, vice president of product management, Oracle. “With these latest enhancements, customers can avoid additional hardware investments on-premises and gain the agility of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers them tremendous horsepower on-demand to drive competitive advantage.”

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 512 terabytes (TB) of non-volatile memory express (NVMe) solid state drive (SSD) remote block volumes, these instances are ideal 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 51 TB of local NVMe SSD storage, offering 237 percent more capacity than competing solutions.

Furthermore, 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.

By delivering compute solutions that leverage NVIDIA’s latest technologies, Oracle can dramatically accelerate its customers’ HPC, analytics and AI workloads. “HPC, AI and advanced analytic workloads are defined by an almost insatiable hunger for compute,” said Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “To run these compute-intensive workloads, customers require enterprise-class accelerated computing, a need Oracle is addressing by putting NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

“The integration of TidalScale's inverse hypervisor technology with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enables organizations, for the first time, to run their largest workloads across dozens of Oracle Cloud bare metal systems as a single Software-Defined Server in a public cloud environment,” said Gary Smerdon, chief executive officer, TidalScale. “Oracle Cloud customers now have the flexibility to configure, deploy and right-size servers to fit their compute needs while paying only for what they use.”

“Cutting-edge hardware can make all the difference for companies we work with like Airbus, ARUP and Rolls Royce,” said Jamil Appa, co-founder and director of Zenotech. “We’ve seen significant improvements in performance with the X7 architecture. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a no-brainer for compute-intensive HPC workloads.”