AWS Compute Cluster #231 on Top 500

Each (cluster compute) instance has 2 quad core processors. The machine on the Top 500 list has 7040 cores. So at 8 cores per instance (880 total instances) and $1.60/hr per instance, that comes to $1408.0/hr to run this machine.<p>No idea how that compares to other machines on the list. You would really need a TCO analysis.<p>When I run our 250 node EC2 cluster of small instances (around $25/hr) I get nervous that it won't shut down properly. $1400/hr would be pretty nerve wracking...

I ran about 100 performance benchmarks on this new cluster compute instance and published results on our blog. It uses Nehalem X5570 with 16 hyper-threaded cores (8 physical), HVM, and 10 Gbps non-blocking network for the EBS volume. Out of 134 different virtual and bare-metal cloud servers I've benchmarked from EC2, Linode, Rackspace and other vendors, the EC2 cluster instance is the fastest in almost every category (CPU, disk IO, encoding, database, others).<p><a href="http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/09/benchmarking-of-ec2s-new-cluster.html" rel="nofollow">http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/09/benchmarking-of-ec2s-new-c...</a>

For me, the biggest thing about AWS has been easy access to * ridiculously* powerful machines for not very much money -- a few of us decided that we wanted to build a markov chain from the entirety of Wikipedia, which is quite doable if you have access to a box with 68GB of RAM. That's quite a bit more than a standard student laptop.<p>I think on the last run we got about 2/3 of the way through; we should be able to do the whole thing if i ever get round to running it again.

Interesting. I just read the article <i>Can Cloud Computing Reach the Top500?</i>, which concludes that EC2 won't crack the top 500. I wonder what changed.<p><a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pauldj/pubs/uchpc09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pauldj/pubs/uchpc09.pdf</a>

It would be interesting to see if Amazon will donate/discount AWS services to non-profits and research institutions (e.g cancer) to leverage this node power to make up for processing shortfalls.

<i>"One of the fastest supercomputers in the world for $1.60/node hour. Cloud computing changes the economics in a pretty fundamental way."</i><p>Good luck getting much computing done at $1.6 an hour... Supercomputing speeds are bound to cost a lot more than that.<p>But it's still cool to have an account on #231 of the top500 list. I have to brag about it someplace.