AWS brings parallel product to Europe

Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the public cloud facilities portfolio run as a subset business to the famous online book store – has added a new big data service to its European roster, offering parallel computing.

Parallel computing is a key element of big data. It allows data sets that are too big to be operated on using a single computer to be broken up and spread over a network with key pieces of analysis taking part using disparate compute power and then being pieced back together at the source to display the results.

Launched last Friday (June 22), AWS customers can now utilise the company’s Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large HPC service from its EU West Region datacentre in Ireland. It’s the first time that the HPC, cloud-based technology has been available outside of the US.

Companies can use instances of the service on AWS’ familiar pay-as-you-go pricing strategy with each instance including two Intel Xeon processers with over 60gb of RAM and 3.37tb of storage. Up to 32 threads can be executed in parallel and AWS’ 10 Gigabit networks allow for low latency when connecting to other cluster compute services from the company.

Matt Wood, AWS’ product manager for high performance and data intensive computing, said: “A wide range of organisations are working with large, complex datasets, including fields as diverse as financial services, oil and gas, life sciences, social gaming, advertising, e-commerce and media. The arrival of the cc2.8xlarge instance size in the EU West region allows customers who store data in that geography to compute, analyse, ask questions and find insight from that data using high performance Intel Xeon E5 processors. This brings the power of a purpose designed HPC environment with 10gigE fully bisectional networking to customers with the same on-demand, utility metering offered by other AWS services, providing faster turn arounds, larger computational runs and a shorter time to market.”

For the full announcement, click here for Amazon’s blog.