Amazon Adds Some Lightning to Its Cloud

Jealous of those research facilities with access to high-performance computing via clusters that tap the particular strengths of graphics processing units? No need–Amazon is ready to rent you that kind of muscle by the hour with the addition of a Cluster GPU Instance to its cloud-computing offerings. Each cluster includes a pair of Nvidia Tesla M2050 “Fermi” GPUs and a pair of quad-core Intel processors, and can crank through a trillion floating-point operations per second. “I like to think of it as a nuclear-powered bulldozer that’s about 1000 feet wide that you can use for just $2.10 per hour!” said Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services in a blog post.