Calling it a "nuclear-powered bulldozer", yesterday, Amazon announced and blogged about its newest cloud infrastructure service, the "Cluster GPU Instance", which delivers supercomputer calculation power for as little as $2.10 per hour. The new instance type employs the same NVIDIA Tesla processor used in three of the five fastest supercomputers.
It is rated at 515 gigaflops (515 billion double-precision floating point calculations per second) and each Amazon instance employs two of them, giving each instance more than one teraflop of processing power. Amazon further allows instances to be clustered "up through and above 128 nodes" for even more power.

Theoretically, a 128-node cluster of the new Amazon EC2 instances would qualify as the 50th fastest computer in the world. The new instance type enables a wide variety of calculation-intensive workloads for applications that include energy exploration, weather prediction, graphics rendering, and video transcoding. And, oh, it is also good for enabling encryption code breaking and identity theft.

The link for this article located at Web Security Journal is no longer available.