http://www.theregist...e_compute_engine/
To illustrate the power of Compute Engine, Hölzle talked about the Cancer Regulome Explorer application created by the Institute for Systems Biology, which used to run its genome-matching algorithms, used in cancer research, on an internal cluster with 1,000 cores. On this machine, the Genome Explorer app took 10 minutes to find a match on a particular segment of the chromosomes between two samples.
After a few days, the Cancer Regulome Explorer application was ported to a mix of App Engine and Compute Engine, with 2,000 cores dedicated to the job, and just by doubling the capacity, it was able to make connections about every two seconds or so.
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While Hölzle was talking, the live demo genome app was quietly scaling out, and eventually was running on over 770,000 cores in one of Google's data centers, and the links were popping up faster than you could see.