Cloud computing has democratised access to a host of useful services, such as storage, VPN and web hosting - all of which have become immensely popular and equally cheap.
This has been achieved by opening up almost unlimited compute power, storage and network resources to almost anyone with a credit card to their name. And yes, the principle even extends to supercomputers - well, almost.
Take Microsoft Azure for example; together with Google and Amazon, it is one of the biggest hyperscaler/cloud giants in the world.
Wading through the mind-numbing quantity of options, we found a so-called virtual machine instance (HBv2) that offers 120 CPU cores of AMD’s EPYC 7002 series with 4GB of RAM per core and 900GB of temporary storage.
Now, on its own, 120 CPU cores doesn't challenge even a supercomputer from the beginning of the millennium. But given it only costs $3.60 per hour (a price per core of $0.03), there's nothing preventing you buying 100 such instance - which could allow you to forecast the weather or conduct fluid dynamics analytics, if you're so inclined.
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12,000 CPU cores combined packs a rather sizable punch and since the Spot can slash the instance price by nearly 80%, one could say we're almost dealing in pocket change.
Have you managed to get hold of a cheaper product with equivalent specifications? Let us know and we'll tip our hat to you.
HBv2-series VMs provide up to 350GBps of memory bandwidth, which is up to 50% faster than Intel's x86 and 3x faster than most HPC customers' data center services. HBv2-series VMs also feature 200Gbps HDR InfiniBand from Mellanox.
Note, EPYC instances are only available in some regions and there is currently a supply and demand issue that could mean the product is unavailable.
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