Akamai unveils cloud solution with NVIDIA GPU for efficient media processing

Akamai Technologies has announced the addition of a new offering to its cloud portfolio, optimised for media applications and powered by NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation GPUs. The service aims to enhance productivity and yield better economics for companies in the media and entertainment industries, enabling them to process video content with increased speed and efficiency.

The new cloud solution leverages the powerful NVIDIA RTX 4000 GPU which has the capability for fast and energy-efficient processing. This characteristic makes it ideal for intensive workflows such as digital content creation, 3D modelling, rendering, inferencing, and video content and streaming. These features are expected to revolutionise media-specific applications such as live video streaming and VR/AR content generation.

Benchmark tests have indicated that GPU-based encoding using the NVIDIA RTX 4000 achieves a frame processing rate that's 25 times faster than common CPU-based methods. This advancement is a substantial leap forward for streaming service providers, helping them to tackle typical workload challenges more effectively.

"Media companies need low-latency, reliable compute resources that maintain the portability of the workloads they create," commented Shawn Michels, Vice President of Cloud Products at Akamai. "NVIDIA GPUs provide superior price performance when deployed on Akamai's global edge platform. Together with our Qualified Compute Partners and open platform, we give our customers the capability to architect their next-gen workloads to be cloud agnostic and support multicloud architectures."

In an environment where NVIDIA GPUs are predominantly employed for large language modelling, Akamai has targeted an industry underserved by current expensive offerings. With its extensive experience in the space, Akamai has customised its new GPU offering to meet the rigorous and specialised needs of the media and entertainment industry.

Besides video streaming and VR/AR content, the new service will be beneficial to GenAI/ML applications, data analysis, scientific computing, gaming, graphics rendering, and high-performance computing. The GPU accelerates computations and allows for parallel processing of large datasets, thereby improving analysis speed and simulation efficiency.

Michels further added, "In order to support a wide range of workloads, you need a wide array of compute instances. What we're doing with industry-optimised GPUs is one of many steps we're taking for our customers to increase instance diversity across the entire continuum of compute to drive and power edge native applications."

The integration of NVIDIA's advanced GPUs into Akamai's cloud solutions attests to the technological strides being made in multimedia content processing and delivery. The joint venture is poised to offer significant benefits to various industries, particularly media and entertainment companies facing the challenges of processing video and multimedia content efficiently and rapidly.