Amazon has one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. There’s something unusual about it, though — it’s not real. That is, it’s not real in the way other supercomputers are, in a huge room filled with glowing, humming racks of processors and storage. It’s in the cloud.
Cloud computing gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so. Harnessing the processing power of multiple machines in different locations to attack a single, complex task that would usually be completed by a machine in a single location is an impressive engineering feat. But as promising as the idea is, it’s not known for high performance and reliability.
At least not until now. Amazon’s cloud-computing service is now putting other supercomputers to shame. The service is based on the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the backbone of Amazon Web Services, which many digital businesses, including Foursquare and Reddit, use instead of building and maintaining their own services. EC2 also helps the Kindle Fire’s silk browser run quickly.
Unlike your typical supercomputer, the EC2 is spread out over multiple locations worldwide. It was designed to give virtual computing power to several clients at once, not attack large, singular tasks. Amazon first rolled out EC2 in August 2006, but it was made to be massively scalable, and it started ranking among thetop 500 supercomputers in the world in 2010, in the 233rd spot. After dropping down to place 451st in June this year, it shot up to the number 42 spot in November.
The high ranking is even more incredible when you consider the EC2 has to run the virtual servers of thousands of businesses while also acting as a supercomputer. Clearly, Amazon has put some effort behind its supercomputing service to improve performance.
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