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1.21 PetaFLOPS (RPeak) Supercomputer Created With EC2
An anonymous reader writes "In honor of Doc Brown, Great Scott! Ars has an interesting article about a 1.21 PetaFLOPS (RPeak) supercomputer created on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. From HPC software company Cycle Computing's blog, it ran Professor Mark Thompson's research to find new, more efficient materials for solar cells. As Professor Thompson puts it: 'If the 20th century was the century of silicon materials, the 21st will be all organic. The question is how to find the right material without spending the entire 21st century looking for it.' El Reg points out this 'virty super's low cost.' Will cloud democratize access to HPC for research?"
The one (slightly) novel aspect of this, presumably also made possible because the workload parallelized well, is the use of Spot Instances. As the name suggests, these aren't Amazon's standard fixed-price instances; but are rather instances whose price changes according to demand.
You make a bid (specifying maximum price/hour, number and type of instances, availability zones, etc.) If the spot price falls at or below your maximum, your instance starts running. Should it exceed your maximum, your instance gets terminated. Using these things obviously requires a tolerance for server outages far above even the shoddiest physical systems; but if you can divide your problem space into relatively small, discrete, chunks, and get the results off the individual servers once computed, you won't lose more than a single chunk per shutdown, and spot instances can be crazy cheap, depending on demand at the time. My impression is that Amazon offers them whenever they don't have enough reserved instances to fill a given area, and will pretty much keep offering them as long as they pay better than they cost in additional electricity and cooling, so if you are willing to bottom feed, and potentially wait, there are some bargains to be had.