Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by codex 5557 days ago
The speed of the interconnect really matters for most supercomputer problems. Without knowing the characteristics of that interconnect I would be hesitant to call 10,000 machines at Amazon a supercomputer.
2 comments

They say in the article the algorithm is "embarrassingly parallel", so then it's okay.

But you're right, if there are any interdependencies then the interconnect becomes important.

Ah, forgive me; I didn't see that.

I wonder how they'd count Folding@Home, then: 500K active clients, 6M total clients, but only a fraction of their clients are active at any given point in time.

I highly doubt it is anything better than a shared gigabit ethernet connection, which makes me doubt that it has any chance at all to get to TOP500 levels, and I doubt you could get enough of the HPC instances (where you are kind of promised a dedicated network if you get enough of them) to get 5k cores.