Amazon has introduced a computer cluster at its facility in Ireland to support European high-performance computing applications in the Amazon cloud.
The Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xl) instance includes a pair of Intel Xeon processors, 60.5GB of RAM, and 3.37TB of instance storage.
In a blog post explaining the new service Amazon stated: “Each processor has eight cores and hyper-threading is enabled, so you can execute up to 32 threads in parallel.”
Amazon said a cluster of 1064 cc2.8xl instances performed 240 teraflops, making it the 72nd fastest supercomputer in the Top 500 list for June 2012. This cluster contained 17,024 cores and 65.968TB of RAM.
Software available on the cluster includes MIT StarCluster for launching and managing a cluster of EC2 instances and CloudFlu for CFD (computational fluid dynamics) problems using the OpenFOAM package.
Amazon's Cluster Compute family uses a 10 Gigabit network.
Matt Wood, product manager for high-performance and data-intensive computing, Amazon Web Services, said: “The cc2.8xl cluster brings the power of a purpose-designed HPC environment with 10gigE fully bisectional networking to customers with the same on-demand, utility metering offered by other AWS services.
"This provides faster turnarounds, larger computational runs and a shorter time to market.”
