amazon does not have a product that competes with this. they don't have a low-latency network. Without that, you're limited to coarse-grained parallelism. Supercomputers like this are built for getting near-peak performance across the entire machine by using a low-latency network to accelerate tightly coupled codes.
Modern supercomputers aren't particularly expensive- in the several tens of millions for the capital cost of the machine, several tens of millions for the storage system, several tens of millions for the space, several tens of millions for the power, and a few million for the support staff. In this case, Sierra probably cost $100M for the base machine and storage services.
What is the distinction between low latency networking commonly used in supercomputers today and cloud computing?
What is the cutoff?
I've commonly seen 500 microsecond latency between certain AWS zones. That's pretty impressive. Inside a given zone, 200-300 microseconds isn't uncommon.
Modern supercomputers aren't particularly expensive- in the several tens of millions for the capital cost of the machine, several tens of millions for the storage system, several tens of millions for the space, several tens of millions for the power, and a few million for the support staff. In this case, Sierra probably cost $100M for the base machine and storage services.