I don't work for Amazon, but here is one of their promo pieces on using 'spot' instances: http://youtu.be/WD9N73F3Fao
at about 2:15, they cite University of Melbourne and Universitat de Barcelona as customers... My interest in all this cloud talk is that I'll be presenting a tutorial on R in the cloud at R/Finance. http://www.rinfinance.com/agenda/ It's really easy to use R in the cloud, even if you don't want to move your data into s3. -Whit On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote: > On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 2:22 PM, John Laing <john.la...@gmail.com> wrote: >> For 200,000 analyses at 1.5 seconds each, you're looking at ~83 hours >> of computing time. You can buy time from Amazon at roughly $0.08 / >> core / hour, so it would cost about $7 to run your analyses in the >> cloud. Assuming complete parallelization you could fire up as many >> machines as you need to get the work done in as little time as you >> want, with the same fixed cost. I think that's a pretty compelling >> argument, compared to the hassles of buying and maintaining hardware, >> power supply, air conditioning, etc. > > Noticing Hugh's .ac.uk email address you do have to factor in the > hassle of getting something as nebulous as cloud computing past the > red tape. "How much will it cost?" says the bureaucrat. "Depends how > much CPU time I need", says the academic. "So potentially, what's the > most?" says the bureaucrat. "Millions,", says the academic, honestly, > adding "but that would only be if my job scheduling went a bit mad and > grabbed a few thousand Amazon cores and thrashed them for weeks > without me noticing". "Okay", says the bureaucrat, "now, can we send > Amazon a purchase order so that Amazon send us an invoice for this > unknown and potentially unpredictable cost first?". "Oh no", says the > academic, "we need a credit card...". > > Maybe there are other ways of paying for Amazon cloud CPUs, I've not > investigated. Anyone in academia happily crunching on EC2? > > Barry > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
