Reality Check #4: Cloud Supercomputing Is Compelling
No argument here, our only quibble being that cloud makes the most sense for spiky demand; if you have a constant baseline workload, there are advantages in owning rather than renting. That said, research tends to be spiky, so it's no surprise that cloud is compelling even for large pharmaceutical giants that have ongoing supercomputing needs. Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe said his firm was able to harness more than 50,000 cores of AWS capacity within a matter of hours, and he figures that system packed the equivalent power of $20 million to $25 million worth of supercomputing infrastructure. At Amazon's cloud rates, the cost was just $4,828.85 per hour.
"This means any researcher with a National Science Foundation grant or any person at an academic institution or anyone at a large corporation can now do science that's impossible to do on an internal system in so short a timeframe," Stowe said. We say, bravo!
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