Amazon’s most powerful cloud server, the Cluster Compute Instance, was made available Tuesday in EC2.  The Amazon Cluster Compute Instance is designed for high performance computing and able to be grouped together with other Cluster servers via high speed networking.

Cluster Compute Instances are being launched as “an open beta,” said Peter DeSantis, Amazon Web Services general manager, in an interview.  DeSantis later said Cluster Instances will be interconnected with 10Gb Ethernet; nodes in a clulster will be able to communicate at ten times the speed of standard EC2 instances. In addition, DeSantis said the Cluster instances are racked together to maximize physical proximity and minimize the distance of any communications between nodes. In the past, Elastic Compute Cloud users have had no control over where two servers that they might activate would be located; now they can direct that Cluster instances be launched to “a placement group” that ensures physical proximity, said DeSantis.

Although I want to try out the Amazon cloud cluster compute instance. I feel that the cluster is a little pricey.  It will be priced at $1.60 per hour, compared to $.085 for a Small Linux server, $.34 for a Large Linux server and $.68 for an Extra Large Linux server.  They keep saying that cloud computing is cheap.  From the looks at this it’s going to be a little more expensive than we had hoped for.  Cloud hosting providers are making their money somehow, right?