Enter The Virtual Supercomputer

A company called Descartes Labs has become number 136 on the top500
supercomputer list just by paying for a large enough collection of nodes
on its Amazon Web Services account
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/20/supercomputer_aws/>.

However, Dr Paul Calleja, directory of the University of Cambridge
Research Computing Services, argues that this is not really
cost-effective compared to buying your own actual gear, and the I/O
performance is not that good anyway. Such a cloud cluster may score
well on LINPACK, but not so well on real-world supercomputing problems.

Dr Calleja advocates using OpenStack to build a “hybrid” combination of
on-premise physical hardware backed up by cloud services for those
times when you need a bit of a (temporary) boost.

And for learner supercomputer drivers, there is always the option of a
Raspberry π cluster to practise on, before being allowed behind the
wheel of a real big-iron machine ...
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