>> again, if you have a bursty load, you want to use a shared facility, >> of which, EC2 spot instances is just one example. > > When talking of using a shared facility: The advantage I've > sometimes seen for "cloud" over the traditional "get time on a > shared cluster"
I should be clear - the kind of cluster I'm talking about is more collegial than the big-time US national labs. users just get an account on Sharcnet (and most ComputeCanada) and help themselves to the scheduler. no asking for time. (we do have a mechanism for allocations as well, but that approach has a very different, generally less satisfying dynamic.) > is that you get to define a lot more of the > IT policy and configuration. that's certainly true, but IMO most researchers just want to get the work done. > You get to choose your OS, scheduler, > compute node configuration, some subset of the security policy which is > compatible with "cloud", etc. You also get your own IT folks managing > it. I would turn that around completely. if you're using EC2, you are queueing jobs in Amazon's cluster: the job allocates your VM hosts, but you are by definition subject to Amazon's config - you just get to layer your own OS/etc on the VM. EC2 runs on hour granularity, and not less than one instance, but it really is a cluster. further, I can take my conventional PaaS cluster and provide a way for user users to request that the job start a VM. bang, quacks like EC2, just less efficient and a lot more sysadmin work (for everyone). (to really make it like EC2, there would be some additional work to set up per-job routing, not to mention auxiliary services like EBS) regards, mark. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
