The cluster, announced publicly this week, was created for an unnamed “Top 5 Pharma” customer, and ran for about seven hours at the end of July at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour, including the fees to Amazon and Cycle Computing. The details are impressive: 3,809 compute instances, each with eight cores and 7GB of RAM, for a total of 30,472 cores, 26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space. Security was ensured with HTTPS, SSH and 256-bit AES encryption, and the cluster ran across data centers in three Amazon regions in the United States and Europe. The cluster was dubbed “Nekomata.”

via $1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud.