Just like a cluster of Bitcoin miners will run absolute circles around a similarly sized corner of an AWS data center, and the supercomputer at Oak Ridge will r

Just like a cluster of Bitcoin miners will run absolute circles around a similarly sized corner of an AWS data center, and the supercomputer at Oak Ridge will run circles around a similar sized corner of AWS of GPU EC2 instances connected via gigabit Ethernet, the NSA's cluster's got a different use case than running web services for every SaaS company that wants to run in AWS. I imagine it's aimed at saving and analyzing/decrypting large amounts of data, and thus is architected and tuned towards that purpose, and thus runs circles around a similarly sized corner of AWS for that particular task. Unless you have experience with the NSA's cluster that you'd like to share with the rest of the class, that is.