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Earlier this month my colleague Bala Thekkedath published a story about Extreme Scale HPC and talked about how AWS customer Western Digital built a cloud-scale HPC cluster on AWS and used it to simulate crucial elements of upcoming head designs for their next-generation hard disk drives (HDD). The simulation described in the story encompassed a little over 2.5 million tasks, and ran to completion in just 8 hours on a million-vCPU Amazon EC2 cluster. As Bala shared in his story, much of the simulation work at Western Digital revolves around the need to evaluate different combinations of technologies and solutions that comprise an HDD.