One of the world’s largest supercomputers lived for only 10 minutes

There was a time when supercomputers were only available to a handful of organizations, mostly governments, public research facilities and scientific bodies. The rise of the cloud computing and the widespread availability of sophisticated cloud workload management (CWM) tools have reduced the barrier of entry considerably.

Only last week, YellowDog, a CWM outfit based in Bristol, United Kingdom, assembled a virtual super computer using its proprietary platform and at its peak, which lasted about 10 minutes, it had mustered an army of more than 3.2 million vCPUs.