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It is still kind of mindblowing that the entire Amazon cloud shows up as 231st of the top 500 computing clusters (top500.org). Are all these other systems just

• eerpini 16y ago
  well that is easier said than done, all the machines on the amazon cluster are machines with common architecture and traditional interconnects, most of these supercomputers have a custom architecture( here I mean just the type of processors and the inter processor connect on the same node) and interconnect, the cost of running programs on these machines would outweigh their usability for the cloud.
• nostrademons 16y ago
  That list claimed that all of EC2 had only 7000 cores, which seems absolutely ridiculous to me. I'm more inclined to believe that the list is full of shit than to think that EC2 has so much less computing power than these other supercomputers.
  • wmf 16y ago
    Amazon ran Linpack on 7000 cores and submitted it to Top500, so that's what appears on the list. Maybe they could have done a larger run, but keep in mind that regular EC2 machines are unsuitable for HPC; I can believe that they only have 7000 cores in the compute cluster machines.
    • eerpini 16y ago
      that is still unbelievable ... they sure have more cores than that just in EC2, and anyway looks like the new GPU instance offerings were not included in the benchmarking, that would have shot the rank up by an order of magnitude !
      • jeffbarr 16y ago
        The Top500 benchmark for EC2 was run on some of our Cluster Compute instances. It was definitely not run on the entirety of EC2 (what would we do, kick everyone else off?).
        • dstein 16y ago
          Which naturally begs the question, "would you?"
          • jeffbarr 16y ago
            I can't see any circumstance under which we would chase away paying customers. Benchmarks are awesome, but keeping customers happy is better than awesome.
        • phamilton 16y ago
          We've been facing that question in our HPC lab. We dropped off the top500 for the first time in 5+ years. We just installed a new cluster, but during our scheduled outage of 3 days we were unable to get a good benchmark with linpack. We've had some interesting throttling issues on our new cluster. Once we started figuring it out, we wanted to benchmark it and submit it in time for the november list. We couldn't justify kicking everyone off, but in the event that we had a catastrophic event, we had it set to run a benchmark before coming back online. Nothing happened (thankfully.. and regretably) so we were not able to submit a benchmark for our new 6000 core cluster.
        • SkyMarshal 16y ago
          Any chance you guys ran it on the new GPU cluster before opening it to the public? Would have been cool to get the benchmark on that entire thing b/f customers started running stuff on it.
          • jeffbarr 16y ago
            Not that I am aware of, but the AWS team is big (and getting bigger) and lots of stuff happens that I know nothing about.