Will Amazon Virtual Servers Lead to Supercomputer Services?
By Rob Scott
December 28, 2011
December 28, 2011
- “The 42nd fastest supercomputer on earth doesn’t exist,” reports Wired. “Except that it does.”
- Confused? Wired explains how virtual servers may augment the possibilities of cloud computing.
- “This fall, Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud — a Web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you want them — and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world’s real supercomputers.”
- The company’s worldwide network of data centers provides instant access to computing resources, “including not only virtual servers but virtual storage and all sorts of other services that can be accessed from any machine on the net.”
- It also shows that “just about anyone can run a supercomputer-sized application without actually building a supercomputer.”
- “If you wanted to spin up a ten or twenty thousand [processor] core cluster, you could do it with a single mouse click,” says Jason Stowe, the CEO of Cycle Computing, a firm that helps businesses run supercomputing applications atop EC2. “Fluid dynamics simulations. Molecular dynamics simulations. Financial analysis. Risk analysis. DNA sequencing. All of those things can run exceptionally well atop the [Amazon EC2 infrastructure].”
- Instead of spending months and millions of dollars building a supercomputer, companies can get world-class computing performance for considerably less than the cost of building their own supercomputer. “Cycle Computing set up a virtual supercomputer for an unnamed pharmaceutical giant that spans 30,000 processor cores, and it cost $1,279 an hour,” according to the article.
No Comments Yet
You can be the first to comment!
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.