Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, has introduced Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications.
The company said that the customers can achieve complex computational workloads with same high compute and networking performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from Amazon EC2.
According to Amazon, Cluster Compute Instances provides more CPU than any other Amazon EC2 instance; similar functionality to other Amazon EC2 instances; and allows applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication.
The company claims that the Cluster Compute Instances also provide increased network throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Applications can see up to 10 times the network throughput of the largest current Amazon EC2 instance types, depending on usage patterns.
In addition, Cluster Compute Instances complement other AWS offerings designed to make large-scale computing easier and more cost effective.
Peter Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2, said: "Businesses and researchers have long been utilising Amazon EC2 to run highly parallel workloads ranging from genomics sequence analysis and automotive design to financial modeling. At the same time, these customers have told us that many of their largest, most complex workloads required additional network performance.
"Cluster Compute Instances provide network latency and bandwidth that previously could only be obtained with expensive, capital intensive, custom-built compute clusters. For perspective, in one of our pre-production tests, an 880 server sub-cluster achieved 41.82 TFlops on a LINPACK test run – we’re very excited that Amazon EC2 customers now have access to this type of HPC performance with the low per-hour pricing, elasticity, and functionality they have come to expect from Amazon EC2."
