Australia's Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has announced its cloud service Nimbus has received a processing boost in the name of artificial intelligence.
Currently, Nimbus consists of AMD Opteron Central Processing Units (CPUs), making up 3,000 cores and 288 terabytes of storage.
The expansion announced on Wednesday will see Nimbus score 6x HPE SX40 nodes, which each contain 2x Nvidia Tesla V100 16GB graphics processing units (GPUs).
"These bad boys are built to accelerate artificial intelligence, HPC [high-performance computing], and graphics," Pawsey said in a statement.
Powered by Nvidia Volta architecture, a single GPU offers the performance of up to 100 CPUs.
"This expansion is going to provide a new set of functionalities for researchers. If it sounds familiar, it is because Pawsey are now playing in the same leagues as Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft who have recently announced their cloud expansion using the same Nvidia GPUs," the statement continued.
Pawsey, however, offers its services for free to Australian researchers.
Based in Perth, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is a national supercomputing joint venture between the CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University, and the University of Western Australia.
It currently serves over 1,500 researchers from across Australia, involved in more than 150 supercomputing projects. Nine Australian Research Centres of Excellence also benefit from the Pawsey centre.
It focuses on areas such as nanotechnology, radio astronomy, high energy physics, medical research, mining and petroleum, architecture and construction, multimedia, and urban planning.
With the GPUs currently being installed, the Pawsey cloud team has opened a Call for Early Adopters program, which is seeking researchers to provide user time on the system to aid Pawsey in "validating and optimising" the service in preparation for