Google Cloud Platform’s 96 vCPU is now commercially available

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) announced the general availability of Compute Engine machine types with 96 vCPUs and up to 624 GB of memory.

Users can take advantage of the performance improvements and increased core count provided by the new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Skylake).

For applications that can scale vertically, users can leverage all 96 vCPUs to decrease the number of VMs needed to run applications, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

Companies can launch these high-performance virtual machines (VMs) as three predefined machine types, and as custom machine types.

They can also adjust or extended memory settings to create a machine with the exact amount of memory and vCPUs they need for their applications.

These new machine types are available in GCP regions globally.

GCP says that customers are doing exciting things with the new 96 vCPU machine types including running in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, media rendering and production, and satellite image analysis.

Descartes Labs co-founder Tim Kelton says, "When preparing petabytes of global satellite imagery to be calibrated, cleaned up, and 'science-ready' for our machine learning models, we do a tremendous amount of image compression.

"By leveraging the additional compute resources available with 96 vCPU machine types, as well as Advanced Vector Extensions such as AVX-512 with Skylake, we have seen a 38% performance improvement in our compression and a 23% improvement in our imagery expansions.

"This really adds up when working with petabytes of satellite and aerial imagery."

The 96 vCPU machine types enable companies to take full advantage of the performance improvements available through the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (Skylake), and the supported AVX-512 instruction set.

GCP's partner Altair demonstrated how users can achieve up to 1.8X performance improvement using the new machine types for HPC workloads.

They also worked with Intel to support performance and scaling efforts by providing the Intel Performance libraries freely on Compute Engine.

Businesses can take advantage of these components across all machine types, but they're of particular interest for applications that can exploit the scale of 96 vCPU instances on Skylake-based servers.

Google Cloud says that they are committed to helping customers access state-of-the-art compute infrastructure.