30,000-Core Cluster On Amazon EC2 59
Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, hooligun writes with an article in Ars Technica about a rather large cluster built on EC2. From the article: "The details are impressive: 3,809 compute instances, each with eight cores and 7GB of RAM, for a total of 30,472 cores, 26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space. Security was ensured with HTTPS, SSH and 256-bit AES encryption, and the cluster ran across data centers in three Amazon regions in the United States and Europe."
Re:$1279 per hour (Score:3, Informative)
The article said each instance had 7GB of memory and 8 cores. That would translate to the High-CPU Extra Large Instance Type:
High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ [amazon.com]
That instance type will run you $0.68/hour standard or $0.24/hour spot. (US-East Pricing) (Spot pricing allows you to take advantage of unused EC2 instances at a discount. Also worth noting is that spot pricing changes over time.)
30,000 cores equates to 3,750 instances across different regions. Here is the breakdown on hourly pricing for standard and spot. (Reality is it was probably a mixture of both and the pricing for different regions varies).
Standard US-East: $2,550/hour
Spot US-East: $900/hour
The exact mix of machines in each region wasn't specified but $1,279/hour sounds about right if there is a mix of standard vs spot across different regions.