In the quest to meet the needs of the scientific community, Amazon has announced a new cloud-based product that promises to bring high-performance computing (HPC) applications to the masses. Pitched as a mid-level HPC solution, the Cluster Compute Instance (CCI) was made available as an open beta earlier this week on the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform.

Amazon's most powerful cloud option yet, the CCI will appeal to a niche of the computing community with an eye for higher performance, or who need to crunch parallel processing workloads. To facilitate the latter, each node in a Cluster Instance is connected via blistering non-blocking 10 Gb/sec Ethernet connection, or 10 times the speed of standard EC2 instances. In addition, the 64-bit platform also comes with up to 23 GB of memory, and 1,690 GB of instance storage.

Priced at $1.60 per hour, the Cluster server is also more expensive than anything else on Amazon's product line; as a comparison, a Small Linux server only costs $0.085 per hour. In terms of raw processing powers though, the computational capability of a single Cluster server is 33.5 times faster than the 1GHz processor that the Small Linux server is based on.

For now, CCI will only be offered on Linux, though you can expect support for additional operating systems to be available in future. With the added bonus that they are managed as regular EC2 instances, any EC2 user can self provision up to eight instances without intervention from Amazon. This equates to a total of 32 processing cores on current four-core Intel Nehalem CPUs; larger clusters can also be put together upon request.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at Infoworld

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