I love living in the future.

[theweaselking]

CycleCloud tears through twelve and a half machine-years of computing in 3 hours, delivering a 51,000 core computer with 59 TB of RAM... for $5000/hr in machine fees.

Admittedly, they pulled every spare machine in Amazon's EC2 cloud to do it, but *they did it*. Utility supercomputing, for a teeny fraction of the cost of building and maintaining a real supercomputer.

Comments

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

51000 cores? That's cute.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

For $5000/hour. Which is the important part.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

If I could rent out a 12-core machine for $1/hr, I would *clean up*.

[mhoye.livejournal.com]

I love how everyone is all "51000 cores like what_ever_".

Being able to provision fifty thousand CPU cores in two hours, bill for it and then just drop it when you're done without ever touching a single piece of physical hardware is pretty goddamn incredible.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not EVERYONE is "what-EVER". I'm incredibly impressed!

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I'm incredibly impressed!

what-EVER.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

And suddenly, all those crypto algorithms that everyone says 'no worries, it'd take 500 years of computing time to brute-force' no longer seem anywhere near so secure.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Usually the crypto brute forcing numbers are more like "if every molecule of matter in the universe was a bit in a quantum computer, it would still take you longer than now to heat death to complete your brute force run".

Which is why nobody brute-forces the keys, they go after the weak parts - the passphrase, the user, etc.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

"20+ million dollars of infrastructure was used for $4,828 per hour. Wow!"

So you paid double? I love the cloud.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

... how is that "double"? That's renting access to a gargantuan server farm, paying server-farm experts to set up your supercomputing job, and then clicking "go".

CycleComputing payed Amazon to borrow their machines, and wrote a program to take a bunch of machines and turn them into a supercomputer.
The customer paid CycleComputing to use their software and their rented machines and run a supercompting job.

Two people were being paid, yes, but the per-hour price tag of the Amazon machines is eminently reasonable and WAY cheaper than setting up that cluster.

[jerril]

By the by: you don't pay Amazon to do much of anything other than set you up an account on the machines, either. YOU are responsible for installing any software you need installed (while the clock is ticking and the data transfer meter is turning over), YOU are responsible for distributing and load balancing your task, etc. Amazon basically just says "Here, hardware and an account!"

CycleComputing is doing all that other stuff, so the customer doesn't have to. Which is pretty neat, and why I haven't, say, rented time on the Amazon cloud to speed up rendering. I'd have to set up their machines, and I'd rather just wait a few extra days to be honest.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. I've used EC2 before.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

...but they have some VMs ghosted with various OS's, databases, and appservers, so there's that.