Amazon's Cloud Supercomputer Is World's 42nd Fastest

According to reports, Amazon has built a virtual supercomputer that runs Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it's cloud infrastructure play, according to a recent list of the top 500 supercomputers from Top500.org.

Amazon's virtual supercomputer features honest to goodness hardware underneath; the self-made supercomputer runs Amazon EC2 Cluster and features Intel's Xeon 8C 2.60 GHz processor with 10G Ethernet interconnects. It boasts 65,968 GB of capacity and 17,024 cores.

Amazon, however, still has a ways to go to catch up to the supercomputers made with traditional hardware.

"Amazon's virtual supercomputer wasn't nearly as powerful as the massive computing clusters sitting at the peak of the Top 500. It could handle about 240 trillion calculations a second -- aka 240 teraflops -- while the machine at the top of the list, Japan's K Computer, reaches 10 quadrillion calculations a second, or 10.51 petaflops," Wired wrote in its examination of Amazon's supercomputer.

Amazon's supercomputer is further set apart by its uses. It's not just built to run specialized applications, its built to give Amazon customers, users and developers access to Amazon's cloud services, whether they're capacity or storage.