AWS Deploys New EC2 Instances For Machine Learning, AI Customers

Anticipating increasing demand for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications, Amazon Web Services has this week announced new cloud computing instances designed for next generation compute-intensive applications.

The new P3 instances, an upgrade to 2016’s P2 instances, are oriented towards applications in computational fluid dyanmics, computational fiancé, seismic analysis, moplecular modelling, and autonomous vehicle systems, and are the first instances to include NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.

“When we launched our P2 instances last year, we couldn’t believe how quickly people adopted them,” said Matt Garman, vice president of Amazon Web Services’ EC2 unit. “Most of the machine learning in the cloud today is done on P2 instances, yet customers continue to be hungry for more powerful instances.”

According to Garman, the P3 instances now provide 14 times better performance than their predecessors, and massively reduce the time involved in training machine learning models.

Floating point performance

“In addition, high performance computing applications will benefit from up to 2.7 times improvement in double-precision floating point performance,” said Garman.

One AWS customer already using the P3 instances is Airbnb. For the online rental marketplace, the Intel-powered P3s perfectly suit the necessity for machine learning power in processing and optimising customer searches.

These use-cases are highly specific to our industry and require machine learning models that use several different types of data sources, such as guest and host preferences, listing location and condition, seasonality, and price,” said Nick Handel at Airbnb. “With Amazon EC2 P3 instances, we have the ability to run training workloads faster, enabling us to iterate more, build better machine learning models and reduce cost.”

From this week, Amazon EC2 P3 Instances are generally available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU West (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions with support for additional regions coming soon. They are available in three sizes, with one, four, and eight GPUs, and can be purchased On-demand, Reserved or Spot instances.

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