At 09:00 AM 8/19/2009, Doug Roberts wrote:
From: Douglas Roberts <d...@parrot-farm.net>
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To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam@redfish.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:38:23 -0600
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Subject: [FRIAM] Information request
Message: 1
Hi, all.
I am interested in learning what kind of experiences users of
Amazon's EC2 resources have had. What resources have you used; what
has been your experience with availability, ease of use, cost, data
transfer, privacy, etc.?
TIA,
--Doug
--
Doug Roberts
<mailto:drobe...@rti.org>drobe...@rti.org
<mailto:d...@parrot-farm.net>d...@parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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Doug,
I don't have direct experience with EC2. However, I attended a
computational biology conference about two years ago in which Amazon
gave a talk on the system. Here's what I distilled:
1. If computation-to-communication ratio of your
application is >> 1 (e.g., the SETI power-spectrum analysis problem),
EC2's network performance is benign. If, in order to realize a
time-to-solution in your lifetime, your application requires a
computation/communication ratio approaching 1 (e.g., an extreme-scale
adaptive Eulerian mesh radiation-hydrodynamics code), the EC2 network
is your enemy.
2. For comparable problem setups, EC2 was less expensive
than buying time on IBM's pay-per-use Blue Gene system.
3. For comparable problem setups and theoretical peaks,
over the lifecycle the EC2 is less expensive per CPU-hour than a
cluster of PCs linked by fast Ethernet.
4. There was general agreement among the half-dozen or so
users of pay-per-use commercial clusters who were present at the talk
that EC2 gave the best bang for the buck.
Jack K. Horner
P. O. Box 266
Los Alamos, NM 87544-0266
Voice: 505-455-0381
Fax: 505-455-0382
email: jhor...@cybermesa.com
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