Scottish uni slams on the Accelerator to boost UK boffinry The boffins who run two big supercomputers on behalf of the UK government and academic research institutions - as well as one smaller machine aimed at industrial users - have converted those machines into an HPC utility called Accelerator. And they want you to buy core-hours on their machines instead of wasting your money …
Don't know from what moon you people are coming from but buying processing power on educational/governmental supers (excluding those from the military-surveillance complex of course) has always been the norm. It's not like you are going to run your Fluid Dynamics on Amazon ECC. Well, you can, but there are some drawbacks.
Abstract needed? Performance Analysis of High Performance Computing Applications on the Amazon Web Services Cloud
Cloud computing has seen tremendous growth, particularly for commercial web applications. The on-demand, pay-as-you-go model creates a flexible and cost-effective means to access compute resources. For these reasons, the scientific computing community has shown increasing interest in exploring cloud computing. However, the underlying implementation and performance of clouds are very different from those at traditional supercomputing centers. It is therefore critical to evaluate the performance of HPC applications in today's cloud environments to understand the tradeoffs inherent in migrating to the cloud. This work represents the most comprehensive evaluation to date comparing conventional HPC platforms to Amazon EC2, using real applications representative of the workload at a typical supercomputing center. Overall results indicate that EC2 is six times slower than a typical mid-range Linux cluster, and twenty times slower than a modern HPC system. The interconnect on the EC2 cloud platform severely limits performance and causes significant variability.
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