The NAS parallel benchmark suite are used to represent tasks that appear often in scientific computing. They were designed so that running them on a computing platform would tell us how amenable that platform is for scientific computing.
Yes, but it's a benchmark of the hardware environment. This is more than anything else a test of resource allocation latency. The poster posits that EC2 can get the boxes working faster and get you your answers sooner.
But the result here is that the benchmark will complete with "high probability" within about 6.5 minutes on EC2 for a task that only takes 15 minutes to run on your desktop CPU. That model is wildly overestimating the impact of latency on the computation cost.
