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1.21 PetaFLOPS (RPeak) Supercomputer Created With EC2

Posted by Unknown on from the when-do-we-get-to-jigga-flops dept.

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?"

5 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. 1.21 PetaFLOPS (RPeak) by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Informative

    1.21 PetaFLOPS (RPeak)

    Getting RPeak high is simply a matter of getting enough computers which you have access to. They could be connected by TCP/IP over pigeons or PPP over two tin cans and a piece of wet string.

    Basically getting a high RPeak on EC2 requires the following procedure:
    1. Pay a fuck load of money
    2. Create new instance.
    3. Goto 2.

    Basically this article translates to "Amazon has a lot of computers and this guy rented out a bunch of them at once".

    Which I'm sure is good for his research, which must be of the very parallelizable type. I have done such stuff too in the past and it's nice when you have it.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
    1. Re:1.21 PetaFLOPS (RPeak) by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. FTA by Saethan · · Score: 4, Insightful
    FTA:

    Megarun's compute resources cost $33,000 through the use of Amazon's low-cost spot instances, we're told, compared with the millions and millions of dollars you'd have to spend to buy an on-premises rig.

    Running somebody else's machines for 18 hours costs less than buying a machine that powerful for yourself to run 24/7...

    NEWS AT 11!

  3. HPC? by NothingMore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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?

  4. Good but not great by Enry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So this ran for 18 hours, or about $1800/hour. That gives you just under $44,000 per day, or $16 million for a year.

    Give me $16 million a year and I can build you a very kick-butt cluster - the one I'm just finishing up is 5000 cores at about $3 million.

    EC2 is great if your needs are small and intermittent. But if you're part of a larger organization that has continual HPC needs, you're going to be better off building it yourself for a while.