Way back when, so the story goes, someone said we’d only need five computers for the whole world. It’s quite easy to argue that Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and the like are all implementations of a massively scalable compute cluster, with each server and each data center another component that adds up to build a huge, planetary-scale computer. In fact, many of the technologies that power our clouds were originally developed to build and run supercomputers using off-the-shelf commodity hardware.
