OP here - the crazy thing is that WVLA says they are trying to contact YTTV staff but that:

"Compounding the problem is WVLA engineers can’t get in touch with anyone from the streaming giant to solve the problem."

Issue appears fixed.

Here are a couple of non-technical summaries:

http://www.aaas.org/news/new-genome-sequences-reveal-bird-tr...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-11/an-unprecedented-fl...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141211-bird-...

The parrot video linked at the top of the article is also worth watching, along with a follow-up read of the text related to the video (npr.org):

video: http://t.co/M3qL1or article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/04/07/135209962/watch-lis...

I should also add that the top youtube comment for this video (a transcription of the bird's conversation) is actually the most useful (perhaps only useful) youtube comment I've come across.

better than might... you can: http://www.top500.org/system/10661

Amazon can. That has no information about how the nodes were allocated. They could have hand picked X rack of nodes that were all connected via the same switch, etc. You don't get that guarantee from AWS.

Fair enough, I guess.... they could have done many things.

Although they do not provide an answer, here are some links to additional info - I spent some time searching for additional info on the Top500 setup, but found little:

* http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/the-new-amazon-ec2-instan... * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904590