Thursday, August 24, 2006
Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations
I did not get too excited about Amazon's S3 online storage web services, but the Amazon cloud web services look very compelling: $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed) where an instance is roughly equivalent to 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
I sometimes do large machine learning runs, and the two computers on my local LAN that I usually use (dual CPU Mac tower with 1.5 gigs RAM, Dell dual Pentium with 1 gig of RAM) are fairly fast, but there is often that pesky overnight wait to get a run in.
I need to spend more time checking out Amazon's code samples and documentation, but the idea of spending perhaps $10 and getting a long running machine learning run done quickly is very compelling.
PS. I just tried to sign up for the service, but their beta is full :-(
PSS. I just got an account :-)
I sometimes do large machine learning runs, and the two computers on my local LAN that I usually use (dual CPU Mac tower with 1.5 gigs RAM, Dell dual Pentium with 1 gig of RAM) are fairly fast, but there is often that pesky overnight wait to get a run in.
I need to spend more time checking out Amazon's code samples and documentation, but the idea of spending perhaps $10 and getting a long running machine learning run done quickly is very compelling.
PS. I just tried to sign up for the service, but their beta is full :-(
PSS. I just got an account :-)
# posted by Mark Watson, author and consultant : 4:43 PM
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