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Oracle announces new bare metal instances for HPC workloads

The Intel Xeon-powered instances are part of Oracle's "clustered network" offering, which provides access to a low-latency, high-bandwidth RDMA network.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Oracle today announced the general availability of new bare metal Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute instances, powered by Intel Xeon processors. These new instances add to Oracle's CPU- and GPU-based high performance computing (HPC) workloads, with the aim of convincing large businesses to bring legacy HPC workloads to the cloud for the first time.

The instances are part of Oracle's new "Clustered Network" offering, which provides access to a low-latency, high-bandwidth remote direct memory access (RDMA) network. Oracle says it's the only cloud provider offering bare metal Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with RDMA.

Also: Amazon's consumer business moves from Oracle to AWS, but Larry Ellison won't stop talking

With the Clustered Network, companies can run performance-sensitive workloads, such as AI or engineering simulations.

"HPC has been underserved in the cloud due to lack of high performance networking (RDMA) and unappealing price/performance," Vinay Kumar, VP of product management & strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said in a statement. "We've listened to our customers and over the last few years Oracle has focused on improving high performance bare-metal offerings, such as Clustered Networking, to provide on-premise customers with the options they need to extend their HPC workloads to the cloud."

Last month, Oracle rolled out bare metal instances on AMD EPYC processors, making it the largest cloud provider with that option. Earlier in the year, the company rolled out a bare metal offering with eight Nvidia Volta-based GPUs, as well as deep learning and HPC tools to exploit the Volta architecture.

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison first introduced Oracle's bare metal cloud services at the annual OpenWorld conference in 2016, calling it a key advantage over Amazon Web Services. Oracle still trails AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud market. However, with the next few years looking to be critical for cloud providers, Oracle is still betting that it can win enterprise customers with significant database workloads.

Prior and related coverage:

Larry Ellison pitches Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud as purpose-built for enterprise

At Oracle OpenWorld, the CTO appealed to customers with significant database workloads -- and those looking for an AWS alternative.

Oracle brings Nvidia's Volta-based Tesla GPUs to Cloud Infrastructure

In addition to the new bare metal infrastructure offering, Oracle is introducing more deep learning and HPC tools, as well as new design and engineering apps.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure introduces AMD EPYC powered instances

Oracle says it's the largest public cloud provider to have bare metal instances on AMD EPYC processors.

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