4 ms·
Dumb question, but what defines a supercomputer? I would say EC2 is a supercomputer too, which is effectively computing The Internet live.
by marmshallow 7y ago
Dumb question, but what defines a supercomputer? I would say EC2 is a supercomputer too, which is effectively computing The Internet live.
- xtreme 7y agoThe definition of a supercomputer has changed over the years, but currently what defines a supercomputer is its interconnect. Most of them have InfiniBand or similar with <1us node-to-node latency. It's necessary for the type of workloads typically run on supercomputers, e.g. scientific applications. The fastest you can get on EC2 right now is ~15us, and that requires specialized hardware and software.
- CodeWriter23 7y agoBack in the day, Geoffrey Fox defined a Supercomputer as a compute system that costs $20M or more. I think that definition still holds to some extent.