Perhaps I should be a bit more clear and less snarky. I think Cycle has had a great press release, it has advertised their product well, and like any good press release it doesn't so much read like an advertisement for a particular company as it does as real news. This defines great execution of the PR technique known as 'article placement.'
One of the qualities of making it a great soundbite is that Schrodinger, the company that it nominally the topic of the story, goes on about how their 1,500 core cluster can't give them the resolution they need but a 50,000 core cluster makes everything clear. Understand that a 'westmere' processor is potentially 12 cores (if you use Intel's defintion of threads and I'm sure they do), and the typical motherboard is 2 CPUs so that is 24 'cores' per machine [1]. A 1,500 core cluster is 62 machines, that is a couple of cabinets worth if you're using Supermicro boxes, less than a cabinet if your using OpenCompute type cabinets [2]. And at maybe $3K each that is an investment of $186K, maybe $250K if you included switches. Which is about 1/3 what it would have cost a pharmaceutical company to buy a VAX minicomputer back in the day.
My point is that if you're in a multi-billion dollar market place, you can afford to spend more on your hardware. And even at approximately $5K/hr a 50,000 node cluster is only 2100 Open Compute servers in 24 of their 'triplet' cabinets.
That is about 1MW critical kW of compute power. (1MW being the power commitment you would have to buy from a colocation center to power it) and even that is a fairly small foot print at Amazon, Google, Facebook, or even Apple with its new $1B data center [3].
So when I read the story, I was left thinking "Gee, if using a cluster that was 33x bigger got them such great results, why not use one that 3000x bigger? Wouldn't that just answer the question?" And of course I took a moment to analyze that thought and asked the question every critical reader has to ask which is, "What is this article trying to say anyway? And do I believe it?" And that was when it becomes obvious what the article is saying is that Cycle, the company that makes a living creating virtual super computers for embarrassingly parallel problems out of EC-2 instances has reached the point where they can get 50K cores running the same problem." Which is great and all but like a long story that is just a setup for bad pun, it leaves me feeling jaded, and hence my snarky remark that if all it takes is more cores, Google should stop trying to be a great advertising company and switch to being a pharmaceutical company. Which, when you say that out loud you realize it couldn't possibly be that easy and yes, its a snarky way of expressing irritation that I was lead to believe there was something newsworthy here when there wasn't.
[1] http://opencompute.org/projects/intel-motherboard/
[2] http://opencompute.org/projects/triplet-racks/
[3] http://gigaom.com/apple/apples-new-north-carolina-data-cente...