Amazon Installs TOP500-class HPC cluster in Ireland

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Sophie Curtis from Techworld writes AWS HPC cloud services are available outside the US for the first time. In what may be the first in a series of deployments, Amazon Web Services has installed a cluster system at its EU West facility in Ireland.

Each Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xl) instance includes a pair of Intel Xeon processors, 60.5GB of RAM, and 3.37TB of instance storage, according to AWS. Each processor has 8 cores and hyperthreading is enabled, so users can execute up to 32 threads in parallel.

The arrival of the cc2.8xlarge instance size in the EU West region allows customers who store data in that geography to compute, analyse, ask questions and find insight from that data using high performance Intel Xeon E5 processors,” said Wood. “This brings the power of a purpose designed HPC environment with 10GbE fully bisectional networking to customers with the same on-demand, utility metering offered by other AWS services, providing faster turn arounds, larger computational runs and a shorter time to market.”

The new HPC instances are priced at $2.70 (£1.73) per hour for Linux and $2.97 (£1.90) per hour for Windows. Amazon said that cc2.8xl instances had formed the basis of a computing cluster which clocked a maximum speed of 240 teraflops. The cluster, which contains 17,024 cores and 65.968 TB of RAM, currently ranks number 72 on the TOP500 list. Read the Full Story.