by David Zax, Technology Review
It may be stretching the point a little to call it, as Wired’s Cade Metz does, the “world’s fastest nonexistent supercomputer.” Amazon’s supercomputer–it built one recently atop its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)–exists alright, although it is virtual. Most salient, though, is the fact that Amazon promises to bring supercomputing power to, if not the masses, then at least to anyone with a big question a decently-sized grant. Amazon has been building virtual supercomputers on its cloud for a while now, entering the ranks of the top 500 fastest in 2010. Recently, though, Amazon’s offering climbed to become the 42nd fastest in the world. Amazon has become a major player in cloud services since 2006, when its CTO Werner Vogels decided to start selling the spare capacity of Amazon’s servers.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27453/?p1=blogs
Share on Facebook