Amazon recently announced a developer preview of their new F1 instance. Equipped with Intel Broadwell E5 2686 v4 processors (2.3 GHz base speed, 2.7 GHz Turbo mode on all cores, and 3.0 GHz Turbo mode on one core), up to 976 GB of memory, up to 4 TB of NVMe SSD storage, and one to eight FPGAs, the F1 instances provide you with plenty of resources to complement your core, FPGA-based logic. The specs on the Xilinx FPGA are: Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P fabricated using a 16 nm process; 64 GiB of ECC-protected memory on a 288-bit wide bus (four DDR4 channels); Dedicated PCIe x16 interface to the CPU; Approximately 2.5 million logic elements; Approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines; Virtual JTAG interface for debugging.

Amazon EC2 users will soon have the ability to add OpenGL acceleration to existing EC2 instance types. Amazon-optimized OpenGL library will automatically detect and make use of Elastic GPUs. Amazon will start out with Windows support for OpenGL, and plan to add support for the Amazon Linux AMI and other versions of OpenGL after that. The GPU added to the instance can have 1, 2, 4, or 8 gigabytes of video memory. It’s becoming much easier to use OpenGL from GPUs in the cloud.

Marcus Kruger from Goo Technologies discusses why he and his company see WebGL and HTML5 as the future of gaming… in the cloud.

Rayscribe offers a unique end-to-end browser based solution to build and deploy HTML5/WebGL applications in the cloud. Using stories, layers and scripting, users can create a wide range of interactive applications. Highlights include: Fully browser based, no plugins, no downloads required; Project collaboration; Easy to use Scene and UI Composers; Resource editor for HTML templates/CSS/Javascript/Audio/Video/Shader; Model management and Preview and one click publish. We hope users will enjoy creating WebGL based applications using Rayscribe.

Yes is the short answer. An informative run down on where OpenCL is in the all important buzz word of the day: Cloud-computing.