Amazon announced new High Memory Cluster instances for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These are designed for memory-intensive applications, like in-memory analytics, databases, caching, and scientific computing, the company says.

These instances are especially helpful for applications that require a lot of memory on one instance or require taking advantage of distributed memory architectures, the company says.

“Memory-intensive workloads such as real-time applications used by healthcare providers, social networking companies and advertising technology providers require large amounts of memory to maintain high-performance,” said Amazon Web Services VP of Compute Services, Peter DeSantis. “We designed the High Memory Cluster instances specifically for these workloads, and this is the third instance family (along with High Storage instances and High I/O instances) launched in the past six months designed specifically for high performance applications. We’ll continue to listen and learn from customers and provide additional instance families and capabilities to meet the requirements of their applications.”

VP of HANA Cloud at SAP, Sapan Panigrahi, says, “The new High Memory Cluster instances provide sizeable CPU cores and storage to run even larger workloads on SAP HANA in the AWS cloud. By leveraging the strength of SAP HANA in-memory computing, with the agility and low cost of the AWS cloud, a new generation of solutions are now possible. We look forward to enabling these instances to help our customers run real-time applications in the cloud.”

According to Amazon, the the High Memory Cluster instances are the most cost-effective that the company provides, as far as distributed memory-intensive applications go.