96 vCPU Compute Engine instances are now generally available
Hanan Youssef
Product Manager, Compute Engine
Today we're happy to announce the general availability of Compute Engine machine types with 96 vCPUs and up to 624 GB of memory. Now you 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, you can leverage all 96 vCPUs to decrease the number of VMs needed to run your applications, while reducing your total cost of ownership (TCO).
You can launch these high-performance virtual machines (VMs) as three predefined machine types, and as custom machine types. You can also adjust your extended memory settings to create a machine with the exact amount of memory and vCPUs you need for your applications.
These new machine types are available in GCP regions globally. You can currently launch 96 vCPU VMs in us-central1, northamerica-northeast1, us-east1, us-west1, europe-west1, europe-west4, and asia-east1, asia-south1 and asia-southeast1. Stay up-to-date on additional regions by visiting our available regions and zones page.
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.
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.
- Tim Kelton, Co-Founder, Descartes Labs
The 96 vCPU machine types enable you to take full advantage of the performance improvements available through the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (Skylake), and the supported AVX-512 instruction set. Our partner Altair demonstrated how you can achieve up to 1.8X performance improvement using the new machine types for HPC workloads. We also worked with Intel to support your performance and scaling efforts by providing the Intel Performance libraries freely on Compute Engine. You 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.
The following chart shows an example of the performance improvements delivered by using the Intel Distribution for Python: scikit-learn on Compute Engine with 96 vCPUs.
Visit the GCP Console to create a new instance. To learn more, you can read the documentation for instructions on creating new virtual machines with the gcloud command line tool.
At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers access state-of-the-art compute infrastructure on GCP. To get started, sign up for a free trial today and get $300 in free cloud credits to get started!
