Supercomputers were once hardware monopolized only by very large companies, research centers and the government. The rise of cloud computing and the availability of advanced workload distribution options in the cloud have made it significantly cheaper to enter the world of supercomputers.
Just last week, UK firm YellowDog built a virtual supercomputer using its proprietary platform, revealing a computing power of more than 3.2 million virtual CPUs running for about 10 minutes. Of course, this doesn’t make a computer as powerful as Fugaku, but it did at least make it into the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers for a few minutes.
The operation, which was carried out with the support and request of a pharmaceutical company, was operated to run a popular drug discovery application in a single cluster. The cost of the project is shown as approximately 65,000 dollars.
“With access to this on-demand supercomputer, the researchers were able to analyze and screen 337 million compounds in 7 hours. It would take at least two months to do this using their in-house system,” says Colin Bridger of AWS. What is interesting here is that such a large processing power can now be used by anyone who pays. Moreover, it is not a special hardware, but a supercomputer by combining the powers of the hardware that is currently used frequently.
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