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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?"
"Supercomputing applications tend to require cores to work in concert with each other, which is why IBM, Cray, and other companies have built incredibly fast interconnects. Cycle's work with the Amazon cloud has focused on HPC workloads without that requirement." While this is cool, Can you really call something like this an HPC system if you are picking work loads that require little cross node communication? The requirement of cross node communication is pretty much the whole reason large scale HPC machines like ORNL's Titan exist at all. Wouldn't this system be classified closer to HTC because it is targeting workloads that are similar to those which would be able to run on HTC Condor pools?