Amazon offers highly distributed super-computer infrastructure in the cloud
Today, Amazon announced their Amazon Elastic MapReduce cloud web service. A natural extension to their EC2 cloud services on one hand, and a somewhat startling event on the other. In a recent post, I spoke of the global implications of the readily available low cost cloud computing infrastructure. Now, it seems this service has entered the realms of massively parallel computing.
Not clear at this point what the limits of this service are, but the possibilities are staggering. Not enough computing power in Pyongyang? No problem, run your nuke simulations right here Mr Kim Jong-il. An extreme case, and perhaps too complex / compute intensive for this offering, but the point is never have resources of this scale been so readily available. Amazing.
A better fit for tasks like SETI@Home, these distributed networks are useful in solving very large data intensive types of problems like web indexing. Google even provides a nice tutorial on mapreduce. This is also a nice class lecture on mapreduce from Cal Berkeley. Enjoy.