All the hype surrounding Amazon at the moment centres on the Kindle Fire. But behind the scenes, they’ve been developing one of the world’s most powerful super computers — and it powers the Fire’s browser, Silk.
The list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers came out this week. The top 10, as usual, are owned by universities and research organisations.
Look down the list, though, and at number 42 appears Amazon, with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Made by the company themselves, this thing features 17,024 processing cores, 66,000GB of memory and a 10Gb Ethernet connection.
Customers can hire out hours of the EC2 service. Though you can’t use all the processing power at once, for less than $US1000 dollars anybody can have access to grunt that would alone snag a place in the top 500 list.
No wonder Amazon Silk, the Fire’s web browser, is able to make use of the cloud to keep it zipping along. I just wonder when they’ll reach the top 10. [Ars Technica]
Image: kosheahan