[Beowulf] $1, 279-per-hour, 30, 000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

[Douglas Eadline]

--snip--
>
> This has been my argument for personal clusters... There's no accounting
> staff or administrative person watching over you to make sure you are
> effectively using the capital investment, in the same sense that most
> places don't care how much idle time there is on your desktop PC.  If
> you've got an idea, and you're willing to put your own time (free?) into
> it, using the box that happens to be in your office or lab, nobody cares
> one way or another, as long as your primary job gets done.
> Notwithstanding that there ARE places that do cycle harvesting from
> desktop machines, but the management and sysadmin hassles are so extreme
> (I've written software to DO such harvesting, in pre-Beowulf days).. Those
> kinds of places go to thin clients and hosted VM instances eventually, I
> think.

BTW, very soon  prebuilt Limulus systems will be available
(http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com) with 16 cores
(four i5-2500S processors), one power plug, cool, quiet,
with cool blue lights to impress your co-workers.

--
Doug

>
>
> Where an Amazon could do themselves a favor (maybe they do this already)
> is to provide a free downloadable version of their environment for your
> own computer, or some "low priority cycles" for free, to get people
> hooked.  Sort of like IBM providing computers for cheap to universities in
> the 60s and 70s. Razors, razor blades. Kindles, e-books. Subsidized
> cellphones, 10 cent text messages. Give us your child 'til 7, and he's
> ours for life.
>
>
>>
>
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-- 
Doug

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