Amazon EC2 out of beta

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From Werner Vogels’ blog last week

Congratulations to the Amazon EC2 team for the hard work to get to the point where the beta tag is removed from the service and it is now in full production. Not only that, but there now is an SLA, and Microsoft Windows and SQL Server are available as of today.

Why does this matter to HPC readers? Certain types of users with problems that are amenable to loosely coupled solution at-a-distance (from the organization doing the solving) will find this kind of provisioning to be pretty advantageous. A pay-as-you-go model, no need to guess how many resources you’ll need, and better reliability than mom or pop can string together in the supply closet turned machine room. EC2 is the lower boundary case for hosted HPC solutions, if you will.