HPC in the Cloud got a boost this week with this announcement of two updates to the Amazon EC2 instance family. EC2 Bare Metal instances provide customers’ applications with direct access to the processor and memory resources of the underlying server. C5D instances with local SSD storage are designed for applications that benefit from high-speed, ultra-low latency local storage, such as video encoding, manipulation, and other forms of media processing that often include large numbers of reads and writes to temporary storage.