AWS Adds High Memory Cluster Instances
David Linthicum- Thursday, January 24, 2013
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In January 22 blog post, AWS announced a new High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large (cr1.8xlarge) instance type. This instance is designed to provide compute-intensive applications with compute power, memory, and network bandwidth such as in-memory databases, graph databases, and memory intensive HPC.
“This is a real workhorse instance, with a total of 88 ECU (EC2 Compute Units). You can use it to run applications that are hungry for lots of memory and that can take advantage of 32 Hyperthreaded cores (16 per processor). We expect this instance type to be a great fit for in-memory analytics systems like SAP HANA and memory-hungry scientific problems such as genome assembly.”
This is just another example of AWS providing services for enterprises that are looking for high performance computing for specialized applications. AWS is finding a nice niche in serving this high-end market as those who build such applications balk at the cost of purchasing the required specialized hardware and software.
Many thought the market for cloud-based resources would be directed at on-demand commodity cores and storage. Instead, many enterprises keep commodity processing local, and outsource the higher performance computing to cloud providers such as AWS.
