Amazon Launches Cluster Computing For HPC Apps

Amazon Web Services LLC, announced Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, a new instance type specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications.

Features:

• Cluster Compute Instances provide similar functionality to other Amazon EC2 instances but have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance compute and networking.

• Cluster Compute Instances provide more CPU than any other Amazon EC2 instance.

• Customers can also group Cluster Compute Instances into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication (typical of many HPC applications).

• Cluster Compute Instances also provide significantly increased network throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Depending on usage patterns, applications can see up to 10 times the network throughput of the largest current Amazon EC2 instance types.

“Businesses and researchers have long been utilising 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, 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.”