Announcing Amazon EC2 Spot Integration with HPC Instances

Posted on: Apr 7, 2011

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Spot Instances in the Northern Virginia Region. Using High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances enables you to leverage the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. This new feature is well suited for complex computational workloads that have the flexibility to handle interruption, but are sensitive to network performance or need substantial processing power. Examples of these workloads include batch processing, grid computing, MPI, financial modeling, video rendering or transcoding, or Hadoop-based workloads.

To get started using Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Spot Instances, simply complete the following steps:

  1. Log into the AWS Management Console.
  2. Click on the Amazon EC2 Tab.
  3. Select the "Spot Requests" navigation option.
  4. Click the "Request Spot Instances" button.
  5. Complete the launch wizard. Please be sure to select the Cluster Instances Amazon Linux AMI.

For more information on this new offering, please visit the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and High Performance Computing web pages.