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 :-)
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks
My current project (for a large health care company) involves three AI components (a semantic network, and reasoning system based on PowerLoom, and a module using probalistic networks).
We are in a hedge our bets mode, basically using three promising approaches - I can not talk too much about the application domain, but it will be useful to see which approaches end up being most useful.
BTW, I have written about this on my regular web blog, but the release of a new version of PowerLoom under liberal open source licensing (that is, commercial use OK) is a great addition to anyone's 'AI toolkit'.
We are in a hedge our bets mode, basically using three promising approaches - I can not talk too much about the application domain, but it will be useful to see which approaches end up being most useful.
BTW, I have written about this on my regular web blog, but the release of a new version of PowerLoom under liberal open source licensing (that is, commercial use OK) is a great addition to anyone's 'AI toolkit'.
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