On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 5:29 PM, James Mills <prolo...@shortcircuit.net.au> wrote: > On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:19 AM, geremy condra <debat...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I was the poster across from them at PyCon two years back. Pretty fun >> to play with, although last I checked it was hard to do true HPC on >> it. > > Why's that ? And what is true HPC (High Performance Computing) anyway ? > I find the API provided to be quite simple robust and potentially very > powerful - depending on your application.
Last time I checked- and again, it's been a while- you were basically just able to run some (probably computationally bound) function on an EC2 instance that they managed for you without having any of the muss and fuss of doing it yourself. That's very cool, but there are problems where you really need more horsepower than a normal EC2 instance can provide, and if your application crosses that boundary after you've written it against PiCloud you're probably in the same hole you would have been without PiCloud. The other limitation is with problems that take a lot of input data, where it's more time intensive to ship the data across to EC2 than it is to just process it locally. Once more for effect: I haven't played with this in a while, the guys who built it seem pretty sharp, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that they have ways of dealing with this better now. Geremy Condra -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
