Nicknamed after the magical “Nekomata” cat of Japanese nightmares, Cycle Computing’s monstrous new supercomputer can now be yours to rent for the low price of ,279 an hour. By fusing together the face-melting power of 3,809 eight-core Amazon AWS Elastic Computer 2s, the company was able to create the world’s 30th fastest computer with 30,472 processor cores and 27TB of memory — primarily used for complex modeling rather than Facebooking. Components of the beast hide out in three of Amazon’s EC2 data center lairs located in California, Virginia and Ireland, and communicate using HTTPS and SSH encrypted with AES-256 to keep its secrets safe and secure. Compared to the company’s previous 10,000-core offering (,060 / hour), the new version is far more powerful and minimally more expensive, mostly because it uses spot instances (where customers bid on unused EC2 capacity) rather than pricier reserved instances. Good on you Cycle Computing, not everyone has access to a Jeopardy champ.

‘Monster Cat’ 30,472-core supercomputer can be yours for ,279 an hour originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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