On Monday, Amazon announced it would be providing a new instance type that specializes in the processing of graphic intensive operations.  Most computers you order these days come with a graphics card that has a dedicated Graphics Processing Unit or perhaps even several.  These cards have dedicated processors and functions almost exclusively for rendering graphics or video.  This is generally used for gaming applications that require high level capabilities in graphic and physics processing.  Recently, more applications are taking advantage of this extra processing for their own purposes.  With Amazon’s new offering of this instance type, this will allow companies that previously couldn’t make the capital investment in graphic processing clusters to make the jump or allow existing shops to begin to transistion.  You can now launch a GPU cluster with the Nvidia GPU chipset and only pay for what you need.  The cost is higher per hour than regular instances coming in at $2.10 per hour, but when compared with the cost of purchasing, installing, and maintaining an in-house system, the cost is much smaller.  I applaud Amazon on their continuing innovations in EC2, S3, and their other cloud computing initiatives.

Amazon’s Press Release: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/11/15/announcing-cluster-gpu-instances-for-amazon-ec2/