To simulate 205,000 molecules as quickly as possible for a USC simulation, Cycle Computing fired up a mammoth amount of Amazon servers around the globe. November 12, 2013 7:15 AM PST Over an 18-hour period, Cycle Computing used a peak of 156,314 processors on Amazon Web Services for a supercomputing simulation. (Credit: Cycle Computing) Supercomputing, by definition, is never going to be cheap. But a company called Cycle Computing wants to make it more accessible by matching computing jobs with Amazon's mammoth computing infrastructure. On Tuesday, the company announced a new record use of its technology, a simulation by Mark Thompson from the University of Southern California to see which of 205,000 organic compounds could be used for photovoltaic cells. The simulations drew upon the power of 156,314 processor cores at Amazon Web Services for 18 hours to test the chemicals with Schrodinger Materials Science software for computational chemistry. The job cost $33,000. That might sound expensive, but it's cheap compared to purchasing hardware that sits idle most of the time or that can't perform at a comparable peak performance level. The job would have taken 264 years on a conventional computer or 10.5 months on 300-core in-house computing cluster doing nothing else, the company said. Related stories IBM's brain-inspired computing technology (pictures) How IBM is making computers more like your brain. For real Fujitsu supercomputer simulates 1 second of brain activity It's an interesting approach for the modern era of computing, in which companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft operate mammoth data centers and customers can pay for huge amounts of computing power as they need it. Traditionally, such cloud-computing resources were used to add computing capacity when customers needed something extra to get through peak usage times like holiday shopping season, but Cycle Computing's approach is designed with peak computing capacity in mind. It's designed to compress a computing jobs into a spike of intense computing. This particular job was particularly amenable to a quick spike approach. The task was "pleasantly parallel," Cycle Computing Chief Executive Jason Stowe told CNET, meaning that different parts of the job can run independently from other parts and therefore at the same time. Cycle Computing's software handles the dirty work such as securing Amazon resources, uploading data, dealing with any outages, making sure financial limits are observed. To harness the huge amount of computing power, Cycle Computing drew on Amazon services spanning the entire planet. "In order for our software to compress the time it takes to run the computing as much as possible, we ran across eight regions to get maximum available capacity," Stowe said. There's nothing stopping Cycle Computing from drawing on other resources such as Google Compute Engine, but Stowe said its customers are using Amazon Web Services. "To date customers have only moved AWS into production," he said. "In the end we follow our customers."
To simulate 205,000 molecules as quickly as possible for a USC simulation, Cycle Computing fired up a mammoth amount of Amazon servers around the globe.
Over an 18-hour period, Cycle Computing used a peak of 156,314 processors on Amazon Web Services for a supercomputing simulation.
(Credit: Cycle Computing)
Supercomputing, by definition, is never going to be cheap. But a company called Cycle Computing wants to make it more accessible by matching computing jobs with Amazon's mammoth computing infrastructure.
On Tuesday, the company announced a new record use of its technology, a simulation by Mark Thompson from the University of Southern California to see which of 205,000 organic compounds could be used for photovoltaic cells. The simulations drew upon the power of 156,314 processor cores at Amazon Web Services for 18 hours to test the chemicals with Schrodinger Materials Science software for computational chemistry.
The job cost $33,000. That might sound expensive, but it's cheap compared to purchasing hardware that sits idle most of the time or that can't perform at a comparable peak performance level. The job would have taken 264 years on a conventional computer or 10.5 months on 300-core in-house computing cluster doing nothing else, the company said.
Related stories
- IBM's brain-inspired computing technology (pictures)
- How IBM is making computers more like your brain. For real
- Fujitsu supercomputer simulates 1 second of brain activity
It's an interesting approach for the modern era of computing, in which companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft operate mammoth data centers and customers can pay for huge amounts of computing power as they need it. Traditionally, such cloud-computing resources were used to add computing capacity when customers needed something extra to get through peak usage times like holiday shopping season, but Cycle Computing's approach is designed with peak computing capacity in mind. It's designed to compress a computing jobs into a spike of intense computing.
This particular job was particularly amenable to a quick spike approach. The task was "pleasantly parallel," Cycle Computing Chief Executive Jason Stowe told CNET, meaning that different parts of the job can run independently from other parts and therefore at the same time.
Cycle Computing's software handles the dirty work such as securing Amazon resources, uploading data, dealing with any outages, making sure financial limits are observed.
To harness the huge amount of computing power, Cycle Computing drew on Amazon services spanning the entire planet.
"In order for our software to compress the time it takes to run the computing as much as possible, we ran across eight regions to get maximum available capacity," Stowe said.
There's nothing stopping Cycle Computing from drawing on other resources such as Google Compute Engine, but Stowe said its customers are using Amazon Web Services.
"To date customers have only moved AWS into production," he said. "In the end we follow our customers."
