Wired – Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud — a web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you want them — and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world’s real supercomputers.
Cycle Computing setup a virtual supercomputer for an unnamed pharmaceutical giant that spans 30,000 processor cores, and it cost $1,279 an hour. Stowe — who has spent more than two decades in the supercomputing game, working with supercomputers at Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell — says there’s still a need for dedicated supercomputers you install in your own data center, but things are changing.
“If you created a 30,000-core cluster in a data center, that would cost you $5 million, $10 million, and you’d have to pick a vendor, buy all the hardware, wait for it to come, rack it, stack it, cable it, and actually get it working. You’d have to wait six months, 12 months before you go it running.”
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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