What runs faster than the majority of the world's supercomputers, costs less, and was used to research organic solar-power cells? The answer is Megarun, a 1.21-petaflop super that was spun up by Cycle Computing in the AMAZON CLOUD.$33,000 for the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world. Wow.
The system's peak performance of 1.21 petaflops would rank it as the planet's 29th most powerful computer in the top 500 supers of the world as of June 2013, Cycle Computing said.
The majority of the system ran on Amazon's CC2 instances due to the performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, Cycle told El Reg, though it did also use second-generation M3 processors, and the graphical-heavy C1 systems as well. Megarun's compute resources cost $33,000 through the use of Amazon's low-cost spot instances, we're told, compared with the millions and millions of dollars you'd have to spend to buy an on-premises rig.
So if we're living in the future, where's my flying car?