[Beowulf] 10 kCore cluster in Amazon cloud, costs ~1 kUSD/hour

[Chris Dagdigian]

The CycleComputing folks are good people in my book and I bet more than 
a few are subscribed to this list. The founders are old-school Condor 
gurus with a long track record in this field.

One of the nice things about their work is how "usable" it is to real 
people with real production computing requirements - in the IAAS cloud 
space there are way too many marketing robots talking vague BS about 
"cloud bursting", "hybrid clusters" and storage aggregation/access 
across LAN/WAN distances. Cycle has built, deployed & delivered all of 
this with (what I'd consider) a bare minimum of marketing and chest 
thumping.

It's not a PR gimmick and limiting the definition of "cluster" to only 
systems that run parallel applications would alienate quite a few of us 
on this list :) In the life sciences a typical cluster might run a 
mixture of 80-90% serial jobs with a small scattering of real MPI apps 
running alongside.

I get cynical about this stuff because in the cloud space you see way 
too many commercial people promising the world without actually 
delivering anything (other than carefully hand-managed reference account 
projects) while the academic & supercomputing folks are all busy 
presenting and bragging about things that will never see the light of 
day after their thesis defense.

There are people like Cycle/Rightscale etc. etc. who actually rise above 
the hype and deliver clever & usable stuff with a minimum of marketing BS.

My $.02 of course

-Chris