HPC Benchmarks on Amazon EC2

Cloud computing is grabbing people´s attention rapidly as a convenient resource of computational power, and several commercial cloud computing services are accelerating the situation. While priced cloud computing services save pains to maintain the computational environment, there are several drawbacks such as overhead of virtual machines, possibility to share one physical machine with several virtual machines, and indeterminacy of topological allocation of their own virtual machines. This paper verifies usability of Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2) from the view of both value as a research tool, and cost performance as an alternative high performance computing environment to supercomputers. We evaluated computational performance through some experiments with several high performance computing benchmarks, and estimated the operational cost.