AWS Boosts Cloud Computing Performance With High Memory Cluster Instances

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances will serve memory-intensive applications such as databases, in-memory analytics, caching and scientific computing.

High Memory Cluster instances are aimed at applications that require a large amount of memory on a single instance or need to use distributed memory architectures, AWS said.

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"This is a real workhorse instance, with a total of 88 ECU (EC2 Compute Units)," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist with Amazon Web Services, wrote in an AWS blog. "You can use it to run applications that are hungry for lots of memory and that can take advantage of 32 Hyperthreaded cores (16 per processor)."

Barr said these instances can handle large-scale in-memory analytics systems such as SAP HANA in the AWS cloud or serve data intensive scientific programs needing large amount of memory such as genome assembly.

AWS said pricing begins at $3.50 per hour for Linux instances and $3.831 for Windows instances, both in the U.S. East (Northern Virginia) region. Also available are contracts for one-year and three-year Reserved Instances and Spot Instances.

These instances are available in the U.S. East (Northern Virginia) Region. AWS said it plans to make them available in other regions in the future.

High Memory Cluster instances use two Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, providing 88 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, two 120 GB solid state drives of instance storage, high bandwidth networking and 244 GiB of RAM.

AWS said High Memory Cluster instances are the third instance family, along with High Storage instances and High I/O instances, released in the last six months serving high performance applications.

PUBLISHED JAN. 22, 2013