Technology: Amazon hails era of 'utility supercomputing'

Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services is heralding the era of utility supercomputing, with massive computational resources and storage requirements can be accessed on demand.

Speaking at the launch of Intel Xeon E5 processor family in London this week, AWS technology evangelist in residence, Dr. Matt Wood said that cloud computing was a utility service like electricity and gas, because it allows consumers and businesses to pay for consumption of a service on demand .

The cloud of capacity for storing and processing Big Data is only limited by the infrastructure it sits on, said Wood. While the technology can act as a "friction", extending the time it takes to move from idea to result, more powerful processors to help reduce this lag time, opening new opportunities for a whole range of industries.

In particular, scientific and financial organizations with massive computational requirements will be able to rent resources from the cloud to be able to do their work - whether by accident is a product modeling, simulation, or computer - without having to invest in huge infrastructure.

"We are entering the era of utility supercomputing where no one can mark up computational resources, and mass storage requirements on the fly," said Wood. "Traditionally, these organizations would have to supply to 10-15% for the peaks of the request, but the cloud allows bursty scalability, lowering the barriers to entry and allowing them to spend at least 70% of their time in a different job, instead of keeping the light on. "

Wood's statement builds on the ideas of Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, who first proposed the concept of utility supercomputing in October 2011. Cycle Computing to help researchers and companies to run supercomputing applications on Amazon EC2's infrastructure.

"The problem is, currently, researchers are in the long-term habit of sizing their questions to the compute cluster they have, rather than the opposite. This is not the way we should work. We should be providing compute the scale issues need to," said Stowe in October.

"We are talking about taking issues that require a million hours of computation, and responding to them in a day. Safely. At a reasonable price.

"Scratch the surface of this idea, and you will see a world of research in the way I see it. No more waiting. No more R & D folks task-switching for a few days or weeks for a compute is run. Only responses to the speed of thought, at the speed of invention, in the scale of the problem. "

Amazon in November released a public beta of Cluster compute Eight Extra Large (CC2), his most powerful cloud service yet. Each CC2 for example has two Intel Xeon E5 processors, each with eight hardware cores, as well as 60.5GB of RAM and 3.37TB of storage. It communicates with other authorities - or virtual servers - in a cluster using 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Amazon hails era of 'utility supercomputing'

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