I see they're specifically calling out HPC, but I'll only believe they can get real actual HPC performance out of this when I see it. HPC networking (which is 95% Infiniband these days) is just as much about low latency and few hops as it is about high bandwidth. You wire your machines up in exotic topologies and spend more cash on the network than the nodes themselves. You end up with basically the opposite of the elastic philosophy, a behemoth which is bloody fast but inflexible.
If they can show decent scaling to at least 50 nodes (~1000 cores) on a properly constructed benchmark like HPGMG [1], I'll eat my words, but until then I remain skeptical.
I think it is quite clear there are insane amount of money going into HPC like segment. There was a recent tweet about so much Compute Required it nearly took down two AWS Region. I am starting to think Web Hosting in traditional sense aren't really the target customer AWS looking for anymore. DO seems to be fitting the niche better.
I think you're right there's large amount of compute power being used on simulations/computations of some sort on AWS. But I don't think they are "HPC", which is understood as requiring rapid exchange of large amounts of information between nodes. It's more like a "non-HPC compute cluster" which are also useful and which you find in many places both in academia and industry.
If they can show decent scaling to at least 50 nodes (~1000 cores) on a properly constructed benchmark like HPGMG [1], I'll eat my words, but until then I remain skeptical.
[1] https://crd.lbl.gov/departments/computer-science/PAR/researc...