Amazon installs first European HPC cluster in Ireland

Amazon Web Services has installed a cluster system at its EU West facility in Ireland, allowing clients in the region to run high performance computing instances in the cloud.

The instances are connected to a 10GbE network

The instances are connected to a 10GbE network, and can be grouped at the same time for low-latency connectivity to other CC2 instances.

The new HPC cluster will appeal to organisations that are working with large, complex datasets, including financial services, oil and gas, life sciences, social gaming, advertising, e-commerce and media, according to Matt Wood, product manager for high performance and data intensive computing at Amazon Web Services.

"This brings the power of a purpose designed HPC environment with 10GbE fully bisectional networking to clients with the same on-demand, utility metering offered by other AWS services, providing faster turn arounds, larger computational runs and a shorter time to market."

The CC2 instances in Ireland are priced at $2

The CC2 instances in Ireland are priced at $2.70 per hour for Linux and $2.97 per hour for Windows, said Amazon.

Speaking at the launch of Intel's Xeon E5 processor family previously this year, AWS innovation evangelist Dr. Matt Wood said that we are now entering the era of utility supercomputing, whereby anyone can dial up computational resources and massive storage requirements on the fly.

Amazon said that cc2.8xl instances had formed the basis of a computing cluster which clocked a maximum speed of 240 teraflops. The cluster, which contains 17,024 cores and 65.968 TB of RAM currently ranks number 72 on the Top500 list.