Amazon has now introduced an Extra Large instance of its cluster compute machines. This is so big that it wins Amazon EC2 a place in the list of top 500 computers. The cc2.8xlarge instance is currently at number 42, It has 16 Xeon cores, 60.5GBytes of RAM and over 3TBytes of storage. You can configure it with either Linux or Windows Server and it costs just $2.40 an hour per instance.

Amazon has put together a 1064 instance (17024 cores) cluster of cc2.8xlarge instances was able to achieve 240.09 TeraFLOPS for the High Performance Linpack benchmark. (It is this configuration that secured it number 42 in the list of big computers.) Amazon quotes the cost of eight instances as $2.40 per hour so that implies you can have a supercomputer for around $320 per hour.

If this isn't big enough for you Cycle Computing claims to have put together 3809 instances to create a 30,472 processor monster called Nekomata, with 27TB of RAM and 2PB of storage. The cost is claimed to be $1279 per hour which is certainly reasonable in all senses.


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