

Amazon Builds World’s Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer - tilt
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/nonexistent-supercomputer/all/1

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ConstantineXVI
The idea of being able to "rent" a supercomputer at a moment's notice
(relative to buying one, at least) is interesting. Makes one wonder; what % of
Amazon's capacity is this; and how high up the Top500 would all of it be?

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ChuckMcM
In the article they said the 30K core machine would be #42 in the Top500.
Except it wasn't submitted as a candidate.

It would be interesting to have a super computer config in one's EC2 portfolio
for the quick CFD run, or animation sequence.

It is the latter which I find an interesting question. How hard would it be to
create an 'on the fly' CGI studio? Something where your artists and their
workstations are around 24/7 but when it comes time to render you pop it off
to EC2 and just bill the studio for the time. That could be pretty disruptive
in that business.

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narism
There are already a number of services that offer on-demand rendering so I
assume studios that take on jobs too large for their current farm are already
using them. Where I work we often use spare workstations (rendering is a
fraction of our workforce) on off hours to process large jobs but have been
looking at EC2 options for a while. If there were a service that provided a
ready to go solution on EC2 for 3dsmax/Vray, I'd have to take a close look at
it.

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abecedarius
A mere 1000-core cluster should cost a smallish fraction of a programmer's
hourly rate. How to use this power to improve your productivity by at least
that much? I've been wondering this for awhile.

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gujk
At the that scale, CPU and developer time are mostly orthogonal. If you need
to crunch 1000x more numbers, you won't be able to program your way out of the
problem. If your code is 1000x inefficient, it should be easy to optimize a
bit. If you really need 1000 machines for just one hour, setup costs dwarf
compute costs. If you need 1000 machines for a year, you will need someone to
administer the work and wrangle the data.

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cosmez
"just $1,279 an hour to run"

i dont know anything about supercomputers, but is that really cheap?

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ceejayoz
From the article:

> 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.

If you've got bursting needs for a supercomputer - simulations that need to
run for a couple days, maybe - it's going to be much, much more cost effective
this way.

