Yes, a company once rented computing capacity on a supercomputer-scale basis by the hour—but this headline refers to a historical cloud deployment, not a machine with a verified 2026 rental listing. Nekomata was assembled temporarily from Amazon EC2 instances for a pharmaceutical customer.
What was Nekomata?
Nekomata was a temporary high-performance computing cluster assembled by Cycle Computing from ordinary Amazon EC2 instances. It was not one room-sized machine: thousands of cloud instances were combined to perform work as a large cluster. Contemporary reporting called it the world’s 30th-fastest computer, a description of that 2011 deployment rather than a current ranking.
What capacity and price did the 2011 deployment have?
The figures below describe the historical Nekomata deployment. The per-hour amount was reported as a peak rate and included Amazon and Cycle Computing charges.
| Measure | Reported Nekomata figure | Attribution and qualification |
|---|---|---|
| Compute instances | 3,809 EC2 instances | Cycle Computing and Ars Technica reporting, 2011 |
| Cores | 30,472 total; eight cores per instance | Cycle Computing and Ars Technica reporting, 2011 |
| Memory | 26.7 TB aggregate; 7 GB per instance | Ars Technica reporting, 2011 |
| Disk space | 2 PB | Ars Technica reporting, 2011 |
| Reported peak rate | US$1,279 per hour | Cycle Computing and Ars Technica reporting, 2011; included Amazon and Cycle Computing charges |
| Run duration | About seven hours | Contemporary cloud case study, 2011 |
The deployment drew capacity from Amazon data centers in California, Virginia and Ireland. The reports do not establish that the quoted peak rate applied uniformly to every hour, so multiplying it by the run duration would not establish the customer’s exact total bill.
#1 Best Overall
Who rented it, and what did it compute?
The customer was identified publicly only as a “Top 5 Pharma” company. Reporting describes large-scale high-performance computing and molecular modeling, but does not name the company or disclose a particular drug, compound or scientific result.
Why rent a cluster instead of owning one?
The appeal was temporary scale: a customer could assemble substantial computing capacity for a short project, then release it rather than buy and operate a permanent data center. That shifts the decision from comparing an hourly rate with a hardware purchase price to estimating the full cost and practicalities of completing a particular job.
Rank #2
- Ideal for Gifting
- Ideal for a bookworm
- Compact for travelling
- Total job cost: The historical peak rate is not a quote for a present-day workload. A current estimate needs to cover the expected runtime and the provider and service charges that apply to the requested setup.
- Capacity and timing: The 2011 account describes a cluster assembled across regions. It also quotes Cycle Computing manager Dave Powers saying, “Nobody really knows how many instances you can get at any one time from any one [Amazon] region.” That is a historical observation, not a statement of current cloud capacity or service guarantees.
- Technical fit: Core count alone does not establish how quickly a workload will finish. Memory, storage, interconnect and the workload’s ability to run across many instances also matter.
- Placement and resilience: Nekomata’s geographic distribution helped its operator obtain enough instances and provided resilience, according to contemporary reporting. A present-day design needs to assess whether spreading resources across locations suits its workload and data.
- Security: The reports describe HTTPS, SSH and 256-bit AES encryption for Nekomata. Those are details of that deployment, not a guarantee about current configurations; controls must be checked for the specific service and workload.
Can you still rent this exact cluster for that rate?
There is no verified evidence here that the historical Nekomata cluster or its 2011 peak rate is available in 2026. Treat the figure as a record of a completed deployment, not a current price or standing rental offer. Anyone planning a comparable project would need a new quote from AWS or another cloud-HPC provider, with capacity, configuration, availability and total job cost checked for the intended dates and workload.
Quick Recap
Best Value
- It can be a gift option
- Comes with secure packaging
- Helpful in various ways
Rank #4
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