Paul Sellar (Catalyst Cloud)
Catalyst Cloud has released GPU as a service, offering slices of NVIDIA A100 GPU cards to the New Zealand market.
The service is targeted at customers wanting to run intensive computational applications in fields such as AI, genomics, large language models, image and video analysis, big data analytics, weather forecasting, speech to speech and text to speech translation.
Applications that have been developed to use parallel computing frameworks such as CUDA and OpenCL will also run on GPUaaS.
Paul Seiler, chief operations officer at Catalyst Cloud, said the development, implementation and investment required to deliver GPUaaS was significant.
"So far, the feedback has been exceptional, which is a great tribute to the Catalyst Cloud team with the vision and dedication to make this happen," he said.
"Now our customers have an option to use New Zealand based GPUs at a market leading price/performance point"
Customers' data and processing also remained in Aotearoa, protected by NZ's legal jurisdiction and privacy regulations, Sellar added.
Catalyst Cloud has been providing GPUaaS in a “tech preview” to selected customers such as Dragonfly Data Science, which has trialed it alongside its existing GPU services from international hyperscalers.
"To date we have been impressed: not only was it significantly faster than our current provider, but also significantly less expensive," said Finlay Thompson, CEO, of Dragonfly.
"Our engineer found it easy to use and appreciated the local knowledge and support from Catalyst Cloud has been excellent."
GPUaaS is currently in limited deployment but Catalyst said it intended to extend that to general availability soon. Assistance with onboarding and deployment was also available.
Catalyst Cloud is an approved cloud provider to the New Zealand government.
