SCIENCE

Elemental Technologies has announced it will leverage Amazon Cluster GPU Instances with its Elemental Accelerated Cloud Transcoding (Elemental ACT) family of services. In a tiered cloud services offering, Elemental ACT will provide customers a wide range of options for accelerated video conversion with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"The availability of high-performance graphics processors with Amazon GPU Instances allows us to implement scalable and efficient video processing in the cloud," said Sam Blackman, CEO and co-founder of Elemental Technologies. "Running Elemental ACT services on Amazon Cluster GPU Instances will give our customers maximum speed, flexibility, and price-performance in creating video content targeted to multiple screens and devices."

"Amazon Cluster GPU Instances gives our customers the power of high-performance computing, the efficiency and speed of GPUs and the highly available, scalable and affordable cloud environment our customers have come to expect from AWS," said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2. "We're excited to work with Elemental Technologies to bring GPU-accelerated video encoding and transcoding to customers generating multi-formatted video."

Elemental's video processing software is designed and optimized to run on the massively parallel GPU architecture and supports a wide range of commonly used output codecs and formats. The software also supports popular adaptive bit rate protocols from Adobe, Microsoft and Apple for multi-screen video delivery and display. Using the power of GPUs in the AWS cloud, Elemental's software allows customers to efficiently create outputs required for adaptive bit rate, multi-format video applications.

"The growth of online and mobile video and the value proposition of cloud-computing make GPU clusters a natural choice for large-scale video encoding applications," said Andy Keane, general manager of the Tesla business at NVIDIA. "With NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and Elemental software running on Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, online video providers can easily absorb changes and spikes in workflow while maintaining scalable and cost-effective video conversion."

Elemental ACT will be available in tiers with options including CDN delivery, geography selection, back-up services, overflow capacity and physical box replacement. The company will launch a beta program for Elemental ACT in early 2011.