Japan plans 130-petaflops supercomputer
Serious if likely naive question: what&#x27;s the use case for supercomputers these days, instead of just spinning up a cluster in your favorite cloud and running your favorite MapReduce derivative on it?  These guys pulled off a petaflop on AWS with 156k cores for $33k, and that was in 2013.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;18-hours-33k-and-156314-cores-amazon-cloud-hpc-hits-a-petaflop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;18-hou...</a>