Amazon Debuts High-performance Computing (HPC) Cloud Service

Amazon.com is launching a high-performance computing (HPC) cloud service that enables applications to run up to 8.5X faster than its existing cloud computing offering.


Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2 is designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. Amazon said it is able to deliver the same high compute and networking performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2.


"Businesses and researchers have long been utilizing Amazon EC2 to run highly parallel workloads ranging from genomics sequence analysis and automotive design to financial modeling. At the same time, these customers have told us that many of their largest, most complex workloads required additional network performance," said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Cluster Compute Instances provide network latency and bandwidth that previously could only be obtained with expensive, capital intensive, custom-built compute clusters. For perspective, in one of our pre-production tests, an 880 server sub-cluster achieved 41.82 TFlops on a LINPACK test run - we're very excited that Amazon EC2 customers now have access to this type of HPC performance with the low per-hour pricing, elasticity, and functionality they have come to expect from Amazon EC2."http://aws.amazon.com