Amazon Builds Supercomputer; It's Thin Air

Now, would you really believe me if I said the 42nd fastest supercomputer in this world, does not exist? Not using any magic tricks but amazingly still, Amazon has built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud. Essentially a a web service, it works up the virtual servers on your demand. Obviously, there is real hardware underneath the virtual supercomputer but the virtual layer is what makes it available to anyone.

The company has built a worldwide network of data centers bundling it with instant access to computing resources, including virtual servers, virtual storage and all kinds of services available to any machine on the internet. The infrastructure is so vast and well developed that it is capable to run even the fastest supercomputers while it's running a number of virtual servers for various sources. All this without hindering its performance and devotion to each and every task.

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Amazon has achieved a milestone with such comprehensiveness, allowing absolutely anyone to access a supercomputer's computing facilities without having to build one. “If you wanted to spin up a ten or twenty thousand [processor] core cluster, you could do it with a single mouse click,” says Jason Stowe, the CEO of #-Link-Snipped-#. As simple as that. From Fluid dynamics simulations to DNA sequencing, everything can be run smoothly through Cycle Computing's interface for complex computing needs.

Of course, all this comes with a price. This fall, Cycle Computing setup a virtual supercomputer for a pharmaceutical giant that works on 30,000 processor cores, and it cost #-Link-Snipped-#. Comparing this to the amount that has to invested to build a supercomputer, it's a reasonable price to pay for customers who are looking for quick but not a long usage of a supercomputer.

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