The Amazon.com EC2 service is considered the 42nd fastest supercomputer on Earth. What’s interesting is that the EC2 service is virtual and is built on top of the company’s Elastic Computer Cloud. EC2 is a web service that is able to set up virtual servers on an on-demand basis. Best of all, anyone can use it.

As the investigation for the Sony PlayStation Network hackers continues, another interesting piece of evidence is that they used the Amazon EC2 service. The hackers used an alias to sign up for a server through Amazon and they launched the hack from there.

Heroku is a Ruby on Rails platform built on Amazon.com’s EC2 infrastructure. The company has raised $10 million in a second round of funding, bringing them to a total of $15 million. The number of apps using Heroku has risen from 40,000 to 60,000 within the last 6 months. Ignition Partners led the fund. Other investors include Redpoint Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital. [GigaOm]