EPCC in the UK Offers Supercomputing on Demand

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Over at The Register, Timothy Pricket Morgan writes that some of the biggest supercomputers in the UK have been transformed into an “Accelerator” service that delivers compute capacity on demand for business.

To rent time on the Hector machine through the Accelerator service, it costs 10 pence per core-hour, not including VAT charges. You have to buy in 32 core increments, so the base price is £3.20, and Graham says that if you bought 32 nodes or 1,024 cores, that would cost you £102.40 and it would run a simulation in an hour that would take around 40 days on your desktop machine (if it isn’t too puny, that is). The Indy machine costs 5.1 pence per core-hour to rent. Pricing on the BlueGene/Q machine has not been set yet, but it will probably be on the same order of magnitude as the Hector box, says Graham, and if that is the case, and you have workloads that scale well on BlueGene/Q, you could save a bundle given how those Power A2 cores deliver more flops on Linpack each than do the Opteron cores in Hector.

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