Meeting: Tuesday 26th September 2006

[Paul Mooney]

On 27 Sep 2006, at 19:42, Robbie Bow wrote:

>> It doesn't say it can't but like you I have lots of
>> questions. Some of the stuff I do is embarrassingly parallel and the
>> idea of renting 20 odd machines for 4 hours is quite appealing. There
>> would be very little web front end, just some hot machines at the back
>> end :)
>
> Surely you guys should be looking at BOINC, or is your stuff too 
> private for that?

I just looked up what BOINC is... The SETI type stuff doesn't play nice 
in my field of work as we need CPU, memory /and/ bandwidth :( Each 
worker program can access a database quite a lot so working over a home 
users 1Mb broadband connection with its relatively high latency isn't 
ideal. SETI stuff is more about small data set, small memory, high CPU 
work.

The EC2 instances "predictably provides" 1.75Gb of RAM which is pretty 
good but not enough for some of the things I run. Also if I had a 
central MySQL server running on an EC2 instance its physical storage is 
somewhere else in S3 world so access would be slow. If you're DB fits 
within the "free" 250Gb disk space you could copy the DB back and forth 
before and after the work is done I suppose :/

But... you really can borrow super computer like resources for any 
purpose. World Domination is within my reach!!