Amazon today operates at a scale that most people are unaware of and find incomprehensible when they get a glimmer of understanding of it. Just to offer an example, one weekend Cycle Computing used EC2 spot instances to create a 156,000 core supercomputer that spanned 8 AWS regions and provided 1.2 Petaflops of processing power. In its presentation, Cycle noted the tremendous cost savings this offered: $33,000 instead of the $50 million plus it would have cost if the equipment were purchased.
A $50m super computer for $33k