Sometimes paradigms do shift. Amazon announced today that its Elastic Cloud Computing now supports high memory instances:
High-Memory Instances
Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.
- High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
- High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
From Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud overview of instances:
High-Memory On-Demand Instances Linux/UNIX Usage Windows Usage Double Extra Large $1.20 per hour $1.44 per hour Quadruple Extra Large $2.40 per hour $2.88 per hour
These 34.2GB and 68.4GB virtual machines should enable a number of new job types that required more memory than was available from standard instances:
- Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory
- Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory
- Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory
In particular for Electronic Design Automation applications this makes the cloud much more viable as a fourth generation computing paradigm:
- Turnkey / Custom Hardware / Minicomputer
- Engineering Workstations
- X86 architecture PC
- Virtual Machines / Cloud Computing
Sometimes paradigms do shift.
Update Nov-23: The Amazon Web Services Blog announced “The New AWS Simple Monthly Calculator” available at http://aws.amazon.com/calculator