A blog entry from Bill St. Arnaud highlighted the use of Amazon's web services to run bioinformatics supercomuting applications.

Whilst interest in  High Performance Computing (HPC) is rising rapidly in New Zealand now that KAREN is here, we don't hear much discussion of alternative or "entry-level" HPC services.

Amazon has two projects that it has thrown its computing and programming muscle power behind that are of particular note:

S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.  It costs 15c(US) per GB per month of storage; 18c(US) per GB for the first 10TB of data retrieved.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Provides a virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire. It costs 10c(US) per "instance hour"; same data transfer rates as S3, but data transfer between S3 and EC2 is free.

No doubt there are pros and cons to services such as these - but they are likely to play some role in the HPC landscape and therfore should form part of the debate here in NZ.