Amazon re:Invent 2018: AWS Snowball Edge comes with a GPU option and more computing power

Amazon re:Invent 2018 commenced yesterday at Las Vegas. This five-day event will comprise of various sessions, chalk talks, and hackathons covering AWS core topics. Amazon is also launching several new products and making some crucial announcements. Adding to this list, yesterday, Amazon announced that AWS Snowball Edge will now come with two options: Snowball Edge Storage Optimized and Snowball Edge Compute Optimized. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized, in addition to more computing power, comes with an optional GPU support.

What is AWS Snowball Edge?

AWS Snowball Edge is a physical appliance that is used for data migration and edge computing. It supports specific Amazon EC2 instance types and AWS Lambda functions. With Snowball Edge, customers can develop and test in AWS. The applications can then be deployed on remote devices to collect, pre-process, and return the data. Common use cases include data migration, data transport, image collation, IoT sensor stream capture, and machine learning.

What is new in Snowball Edge?

Snowball Edge will now come in two options:

Snowball Edge Storage Optimized: This option provides 100 TB of capacity and 24 vCPUs, well suited for local storage and large-scale data transfer.

Snowball Edge Compute Optimized: There are two variations of this option, one is without GPU and the other is with GPU. Both come with 42 TB of S3-compatible storage and 7.68 TB of NVMe SSD storage. You will also be able to run any combination of the instances that consume up to 52 vCPUs and 208 GiB of memory.

The main highlight here is the support for an optional GPU. With Snowball Edge with GPU, you can do things like real-time full-motion video analysis and processing, machine learning inferencing, and other highly parallel compute-intensive work. In order to gain access to the GPU, you need to launch an sbe-g instance.

You can select the “with GPU” option using the console:

Source: Amazon

The following are the specifications of the instances:

Source: Amazon

You can read more about the re:Invent announcements regarding Snowball Edge on AWS website.

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