Supercomputing Grows in the Cloud

摘要

An economy that continues to stagnate could prove a boon to an increasing number of providers of on-demand supercomputing capacity. The market for such services has so far grown slowly, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc, said on-demand supercomputer services can prove particularly useful to smaller businesses that need powerful processing but can't afford to buy high-performance computing systems. More than 25 such businesses nationwide have directly participated in the Ohio Supercomputer Center's (OSC) Blue Collar Computing Initiative, which sells supercomputing services to companies that have never used such high-end hardware. The OSC supercomputer runs AMD Opteron multicore processors and IBM cell processors; it has a peak performance of more than 75 TFLOPS, according to OSC.