Amazon.com, the retailer who wants to offer everything, is now adding supercomputers to its inventory. More precisely, its Web Services LLC announced on Tuesday Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, specifically designed for on-demand use for high-performance computing.
The company said the pay-as-you-go service is designed for customers who have “complex computation workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes,” or who have applications that are particularly dependent on network performance.
Up to 10 Times Throughput
Businesses needing access to this much computing power can do so with the ability to scale on demand, make no upfront investments, and pay only for the service and time used. Amazon said Cluster Compute Instances offers the same kind of functionality as other EC2 services, but substantially more CPU power.
Depending on the use, the service could provide up to 10 times the network throughput of the largest current Amazon EC2 instance types. Cluster Compute Instances can themselves be grouped into clusters, to get low-latency network performance that node-to-node communication might require.
The company said its new service eliminates the cost and complexity of acquiring and operating in-house computer clusters, enables innovation by offering access to such resources within minutes, allows resources to be scaled to the workload, and allows businesses more flexibility in resources.
So that a developer can tune an application by compiling for a specific architecture, Cluster Compute Instances will indicate the processor architecture to be used.
Peter De Santis, Amazon EC2 general manager, told news media that businesses and researchers have used EC2 to run “highly parallel workloads” such as genomics sequence analysis and automotive or financial modeling, but have been telling Amazon that they needed better network performance. That led to the new offering.
As Low as 56 Cents
He said that, in pre-production tests, an 880-server subcluster achieved 41.82 TFlops on a LINPACK test run….