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30,000-Core Cluster On Amazon EC2

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the still-needs-a-few-more-cores dept.

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, hooligun writes with an article in Ars Technica about a rather large cluster built on EC2. From the article: "The details are impressive: 3,809 compute instances, each with eight cores and 7GB of RAM, for a total of 30,472 cores, 26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space. Security was ensured with HTTPS, SSH and 256-bit AES encryption, and the cluster ran across data centers in three Amazon regions in the United States and Europe."

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:use? by bigjocker · · Score: 2, Funny

    They are using it to pump the economy. The heating produced by this cluster must be cooled with extra air conditioning systems, increasing the demand for power and for air conditioning unis, thus creating new jobs and incentivizing the research for new energy sources.

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  2. $1279 per hour by certron · · Score: 2

    Before anyone else asks what I was about to, the full title of the article is: $1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

    How does that compare to the cost-per-core-hour for other Amazon EC2 offerings? Is this a value meal deal or just a lot of burgers?

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    1. Re:$1279 per hour by mikeytag · · Score: 3, Informative

      The article said each instance had 7GB of memory and 8 cores. That would translate to the High-CPU Extra Large Instance Type:

      High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
      Source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

      That instance type will run you $0.68/hour standard or $0.24/hour spot. (US-East Pricing) (Spot pricing allows you to take advantage of unused EC2 instances at a discount. Also worth noting is that spot pricing changes over time.)

      30,000 cores equates to 3,750 instances across different regions. Here is the breakdown on hourly pricing for standard and spot. (Reality is it was probably a mixture of both and the pricing for different regions varies).

      Standard US-East: $2,550/hour
      Spot US-East: $900/hour

      The exact mix of machines in each region wasn't specified but $1,279/hour sounds about right if there is a mix of standard vs spot across different regions.