For small and medium businesses that can’t afford their own infrastructure, Amazon EC2 is very appealing. In a matter of minutes you can start up as few or as many instances as are required for your job and then turn them off a few hours later when your job is complete. But what if you have a really big job?
ARS Technica has a story about a 30,000 core cluster on Amazon EC2 built by a company called Cycle Computing for a Big Pharma customer. It ran for 7 hours at a cost of $1,279 per hour.
It may be that even bigger clusters have been run on Amazon EC2…
