Amazon High Memory Instances Will Enable More EDA Apps to Move to the Cloud

October 27th, 2009 Sean Murphy

Sometimes paradigms do shift. Amazon announced today that its Elastic Cloud Computing now supports high memory instances:

High-Memory Instances

Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.

• High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
• High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

From Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud overview of instances:

High-Memory On-Demand Instances	Linux/UNIX Usage	Windows Usage
Double Extra Large	$1.20 per hour	$1.44 per hour
Quadruple Extra Large	$2.40 per hour	$2.88 per hour

These 34.2GB and 68.4GB virtual machines should enable a number of new job types that required more memory than was available from standard instances:

• Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory
• Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory
• Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory

In particular for Electronic Design Automation applications this makes the cloud much more viable as a fourth generation computing paradigm:

1. Turnkey / Custom Hardware / Minicomputer
2. Engineering Workstations
3. X86 architecture PC
4. Virtual Machines / Cloud Computing

Sometimes paradigms do shift.

Update Nov-23: The Amazon Web Services Blog announced “The New AWS Simple Monthly Calculator” available at http://aws.amazon.com/calculator

Entry Filed under: EDA, skmurphy