Amazon makes elastic GPUs generally available

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs for Windows. Currently, customers can provision elastic GPUs in us-east-1 and us-east-2.

An elastic GPU attaches to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance to accelerate the graphics performance of applications. They're best suited for applications that require a small or intermittent amount of additional GPU power.

"You can use Elastic GPUs with many instance types allowing you the flexibility to choose the right compute, memory, and storage balance for your application," AWS Cloud Senior Technical Evangelist Randall Hunt wrote in a blog post.

Elastic GPUs come in four sizes: medium (1GB), large (2GB), xlarge (4GB), and 2xlarge (8GB). They offer a lower cost alternative to using GPU instance types like G3 or G2 (for OpenGL 3.3 applications), starting at just 5 cents an hour for an eg1.medium.

By attaching a medium elastic GPU to a t2.medium instance (at just over 6 cents an hour), it would cost less than 12 cents an hour for an instance with a GPU. Previously, Hunt noted, the cheapest graphical workstation (G2/3 class) cost 76 cents per hour.