Thanks to industry observer David Linthicum for reminding us that no, in fact, cloud computing is not the answer to everything that ails ya -- "specifically, when there are high-end computational requirements and the processors need to be more tightly coupled to support high-performance computing standards such as MPI."
Linthicum does consider Amazon Web Services as promising, however, since "putting the right tools in the shed... seems to be Amazon.com's (News - Alert) intent with its new high-performance-computing cloud service offering, which could provide a home for those special applications that require supercomputing power."
Amazon.com's Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large (decaf, please) is, as Linthicum says, "a 64-bit platform with 23GB of memory, 1,690GB of instance storage, and 10Gbps of Ethernet I/O performance composed of 33.5 Elastic Compute Cloud compute units." And if you're one of those guys who used to hide Popular Mechanics magazines under your mattress, well, we know what this kind of talk does to you.
He notes that the default usage limit for the Cluster Compute instance type is eight instances, or 64 cores, "although customers can request more." Either way, however, as Linthicum says, "that's hardly the kind of genetic-workload infrastructure platform Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) is best known for."
Earlier this month InformationWeek noted that Amazon's "most powerful cloud server yet, the Cluster Compute Instance, was made available in EC2, designed for high performance computing and able to be grouped together with other Cluster servers via high speed networking."
Cluster Compute Instances became generally available July 13, Peter DeSantis, Amazon Web Services general manager, told InformationWeek: "DeSantis said Cluster Instances will be interconnected with 10-Gb Ethernet; nodes in a cluster will be able to communicate at ten times the speed of standard EC2 instances."
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Juliana Kenny