High Performance Computing Heads East – EC2 CC2.8XL Instances in EU West (Ireland)

The Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xl) instance type is now available in our EU West (Ireland) Region.

These instances are perfect for your compute and memory intensive HPC jobs. Each instance includes a pair of Intel Xeon processors, 60.5 GB of RAM, and 3.37 TB of instance storage. Each processor has 8 cores and Hyper-Threading is enabled, so you can execute up to 32 threads in parallel. Because these instances are members of our Cluster Compute family they are connected to a 10 Gigabit network, and can be members of a Placement Group for low latency connectivity to other CC2 instances, with full bisection bandwidth between them. You can launch these instances on demand, or you can bid for Spot Instances. You can also purchase Reserved Instances.

A cluster of 1064 cc2.8xl instances clocked in at 240 Teraflops and resides on position 72 of the Top500 list for June 2012. This cluster contained 17,024 cores and 65.968 TB of RAM.

How can you take advantage of all of this compute power? MIT StarCluster makes it easy to launch and manage a cluster of EC2 instances. CloudFlu lets you attack CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) problems using the popular OpenFOAM package.

Watch the following video to see just how easy it is to launch a compute cluster on EC2:

You can find more information about the ways that our customers are putting EC2 and Cluster Compute instances to use on the High Performance Computing on AWS page.

— Jeff;