According to Top500.org, Amazon owns the 42nd fastest supercomputer in the world. But something makes it different from the others-- it doesn't technically "exist."
It is actually a supercomputer running on the cloud, handling the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Of course, Amazon virtual supercomputer runs on real hardware, with a Intel Xeon 8C 2.6GHz processor, 10G Ethernet interconnects, 65968GB of capacity and 17024 cores.
While not as powerful as some of the other machines on the list-- the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, Japan's K Computer, reaches 10 quadrillion calculations per second (or 10.51 petaflops), whereas the Amazon EC2 manages around 240 trillion calculations per second (240 teraflops)-- the cloud makes all the difference.
The EC2 is a supercomputer anyone can use, without the need to build a dedicated machine. After all, it gives access to Amazon cloud services, whether for capacity or storage.
