Cycle Computing, a high-performance computing vendor, has successfully bonded 3,809 eight-core Amazon AWS Elastic Compute 2 instances together to create a supercomputer cluster of 30,472 processor cores with 27TB of memory and 2PB of storage. The running cost — or at least the cost you’ll have to pay Cycle for dedicated access to the cluster — is just $1,279 per hour, or about four cents per core.

Now before you lump this creation into the same category as other examples of frivolous excess — like American food portions, the PS360, or IBM’s 120PB storage array — Cycle’s cluster has already been put to good use doing molecular modeling for an unnamed Big Pharma company. The same modeling task would’ve taken a week on the client’s internal network — but on Cycle’s cluster it took just seven hours and cost $9,000; a pittance to the pharmaceutical.

The cluster, incidentally, is called Nekomata — which is a devilish Japanese “monster cat” with a forked tail — and as always, the devil is in the details. Cycle Computing has made a similar supercomputer before, with 10,000 cores and costing $1,060 per hour, but for Nekomata they wanted to cut the price, and because the cluster ultimately belongs to Amazon, they wanted to make sure that the system is both secure, and resilient to acts of God and connectivity issues.



Nekomata’s control panel

To this end, Nekomata is actually spread across three of Amazon’s EC2 data centers — US West (California), US East (North Virginia), and EU-West (Ireland) — and each of the compute instances communicates using HTTPS and SSH; channels that are encrypted with AES-256 encryption. To keep costs down, Nekomata uses Amazon’s Spot Instances rather than dedicated Reserved Instances; in other words, Nekomata takes about half an hour to spin up, while it requests free instances from Amazon. Cycle says that Spot Instances cost 27 cents per hour, while Reserved Instances cost 68 cents per hour; a significant saving, and the main reason that Nekomata is so much cheaper than the previous 10,000-core offering.

Finally, it’s worth noting that with 3,809 eight-core processors, Nekomata is one of the fastest supercomputing clusters in the world. An actual benchmark hasn’t been run yet, but the previous Cycle Computing (10,000-core) cluster was capable of around 80 teraflops — or approximately the 114th fastest computer in the world. If we assume that the 30,000-core Nekomata is three times as fast, then that makes it the 30th fastest computer in the world… for $1,279 per hour. Not bad, when you consider that a supercomputer installation usually costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to set up and run.

Read more at Cycle Computing and Ars Technica