
New Amazon EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster Compute Instance - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/the-new-amazon-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-compute-instance.html
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jread
This new cluster compute instance size is essentially a variation of the
m2.4xlarge instance (2xX5550 Nehelem - 27ECUs) with the following changes: 1\.
Faster X5570 CPUs 2\. 10G Network 3\. HVM

I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic which is more conducive to
clustering than the standard GigE Nic for other instance sizes. I'm not aware
of any other public IaaS provider offering 10G network currently.

In terms of raw performance the x5570 will probably perform very well relative
to other IaaS providers. EC2 is one of the few IaaS clouds that utilizes a
heterogenous hardware environment to enable better scalability between
instance sizes. Other providers like Rackspace Cloud use homogenous
environments (Opteron 2374 in the case of Rackspace) and rely on Hypervisor
CPU throttling to enable CPU scaling between different instance sizes. On the
low end homogenous clouds tend to offer better value but are not well suited
for HPC application on the high end (e.g. a 2GB Rackspace Cloud server kills
an EC2 m1.small, but the largest 16GB instance lags far behind EC2 m2.*
instances). In fact in some homogenous clouds CPU performance is fairly
constant from small to larger sized instances (you are essentially just paying
for more memory).

I recently wrote a blog post comparing CPU performance of 20 different IaaS
providers including EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. In it I used a compilation of 19
different CPU related benchmarks to produce an ECU metric for about 150
different cloud server configurations:

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-
benchma...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-
in-cloud.html)

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neilc
_I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic_

The NIC is not the most interesting part, but the network is: not only do
these new instances offer 10 GigE, but they also offer full bisection
bandwidth to all instances in a placement group (=> no oversubscription of
core switches). That is pretty unusual, and a big win for network-intensive
applications.

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petercooper
_Each Cluster Compute Instance consists of a pair of quad-core Intel "Nehalem"
X5570 processors with a total of 33.5 ECU (EC2 Compute Units)_

Aha, we finally have another EC2 Compute Unit comparison than the vague
"1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor."

The X5570 is basically a server grade 2.93GHz Core i7 and it equates to 16.75
ECU (since the "pair" is 33.5 ECU). You can then do very vague and imprecise
extrapolation and assume a regular 2.66-2.8GHz i7 is in the 12-15 ECU area
(which makes most EC2 instances look rather anemic and probably explains why
the Redis benchmarks on EC2 seem so poor.)

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DanBlake
Yeah man, Ive been telling people for a while that ec2's offerings are high
priced and low powered. Never would have thought a single i7 would be more
than 12x the power of a ec2 standard unit though. crazy

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mtw
if you're hosting a website, makes more sense to rent dedicated servers. ec2
is great for off-loading peak traffic though

~~~
zemaj
I don't agree. I've ditched almost all my dedicated servers across all kinds
of apps that I run. I now use Rackspace cloud servers as my universal tool for
everything I can.

I used to use EC2, but I've found I get significantly better performance (and
of course support) at Rackspace for the same price. Also avoid Rackspace cloud
sites, performance is pretty awful.

Anyway back to the dedicated server point. If you use virtual servers you can
very easily replicate images, spin up copies and scale your computer power on
the fly. Case in point, I was running one of my apps on a $10 pm instance on
Rackspace. We got a Techcrunch article out of nowhere and the site instantly
died under the traffic. I resized the server on the fly and boom, * straight
back up. Once the peak died down I scaled the server back down. A couple of
months down the track we get near Techcrunch traffic every day and I haven't
had to scale the code base at all - I just keep it running on a larger
instance. Much, much more cost effective.

* ok not straight. Unfortunately when resizing a Rackspace cloud instance under heavy load it takes _ages_ to run (30+ min isn't unusual compared with 5 min under light load). I've found that the best solution is to spin up a copy on another instance and change the dns to point to the new one. I wish Rackspace would add some way to temporarily block traffic to a server to it can scale. Some kind of "panic", scale me up, button would be great.

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zmarty
You actually helped make his point.

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zemaj
Not at all. If you start with a dedicated server you can't offload peak
traffic as easily. Always going with a virtual server allows you to scale on
the fly and cuts costs when not in use.

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RK
My research group has been doing HPC type stuff on EC2. In fact the press
release copy for this sounds almost exactly like what we've been writing when
trawling for cash. Of course Amazon also gave us a grant (in AWS credits), so
maybe we shouldn't feel bad if any of it was directly lifted...

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thu
With 880 Cluster Compute Instances (7040 cores):

> This result places us at position 146 on the Top500 list of supercomputers.

And $1408 per hour.

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usaar333
Using extra large high cpu instances is actually cheaper per compute unit. You
just lose io and memory.

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garyrichardson
Exactly. All that compute power may not be useful if you need the io/memory.

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gmosx
hmm.. AWS is evolving relentlessly, GAE engineers should work harder (and
faster) to catch up... It will be an interesting battle (and let's not forget
about Microsoft, or even Apple)

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tszming
It is interesting that the new Cluster Compute Instances use HVM instead of
paravirtualization, does it mean AWS is moving away from Xen?

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cperciva
Xen supports both PV and HVM.

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frisco
The post is signed quite ambiguously "Jeff". Given that it's Amazon making a
fairly large announcement here, they could do to include a last name there...

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jeffbarr
That's me...

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tszming
Hi Jeff, can you say something why Cluster Compute Instances use HVM instead
of paravirtualization?

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ericb
With so many different options, it makes me wonder if they could do a choose-
your-own setup and pay by the core/memory/disk you select.

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helium
Any good ideas what you could use this for?

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mtw
crunching numbers (such as estimating where the oil spill is expanding,
weather prediction, etc.)

