With their announcement earlier this year of their Amazon EC2 cloud for HPC, Amazon set their sights squarely on the Supercomputing community at SC10. They won’t have their own booth at SC10, but the are planning what they call a “Disruptive Webcast” on Tuesday Nov 16, 11am CST.
Deepak Singh of AWS will talk about how customers are using Amazon’s EC2 to meet their computing needs. Dial-in details are posted, but the webcast will also be streamed live on the trade exhibit floor at the Univa UD, Platform Computing, and Cycle Computing booths.
The Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute instance type is specifically designed to combine high compute performance with high performance network capability to meet the needs of HPC applications. Unique to Cluster Compute instances is the ability to group them into clusters of instances for use with HPC applications. This is particularly valuable for those applications that rely on protocols like Message Passing Interface (MPI) for tightly coupled inter-node communication. Cluster instances provide low latency, full bisection 10 Gbps bandwidth between instances, they also provide specific processor architecture in their definition to allow developers to tune their applications and achieve optimal performance.
Will AWS tip over the apple cart and get the business? Well, they’re lining up with all the right partners to get traction. And at rates starting at $1.60 per hour, what have you got to lose?
[…] Workstation applications will bring HPC to the masses. Autodesk’s Project Cumulus and the ISVs lining up behind GreenButton are showing the way, and they’ll do it because it expands — not threatens — their market. Both these companies have figured out how to put a cloud behind applications and in so doing deliver game-changing productivity: the kind of performance that can potentially match traditional grid computing but with nearly no effort by the customer. These moves leverage cloud economics and may disrupt supercomputing. […]