Amazon Builds World's Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer: The 42nd fastest supercomputer on earth doesn't exist. This fall, Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud -- a web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you want them -- and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world's real supercomputers. Amazon is the poster child for the age of cloud computing. Alongside their massive e-tail business, Jeff Bezos and company have built a worldwide network of data centers that gives anyone instant access to all sorts of computing resources, including not only virtual servers but virtual storage and all sorts of other services that can be accessed from any machine on the net. This global infrastructure is so large, it can run one of the fastest supercomputers on earth -- even as it's running thousands upon thousands of other virtual servers for the world's businesses and developers.