Did Amazon Just Move Supercomputing to the Cloud? reports:
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Perhaps it was inevitable: the cloud is already parsing enormous quantities of information at a high speed for the world's webmasters; why not diversify its processor types and apply that power to problems that previously required in-house supercomputing resources?
That's the pitch behind Amazon's new GPU-powered Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on-demand computing resources, powered by NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs. Amazon's on-demand computing resources have long been used for processing chunks of data too large for in-house resources--famously, the New York Times used EC2 to parse 405,000 giant TIFF files in order to make 71 years of its archives available to the public.
Making GPU-based servers that can accomplish the same thing is a logical extension of Amazon's existing CPU-based server technology. Amazon has also taken extra steps to make sure that these servers are well-suited to high performance computing applications, including 10 Gbps Ethernet interconnects "with the ability to create low latency, full bisection bandwidth HPC clusters."
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Cloud computing fascinates me. There seems to be great potential.
The idea of rent a supercomputer for a couple hours seems cool.
We live in an amazing world.
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