[Gllug] Lots of computing power required - is Amazon EC2 an answer?

[John Hearns]

On 30 June 2011 23:05, Adrian McMenamin <adrian at mcmen.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Is Amazon EC2 a possible answer - it seems less than clear to me if this
> is about web serving or computing - so I thought I'd ask where people will
> know the answer straight away :)

Amazon EC2 is definitely about computing as well as web serving.
They have 'large' machine instances available, and you can specify
that all machines are in the same geographical location for instance.
Someone I used to work with, who is a real MPI (parallel programming)
wizz has given examples of using EC2 for MPI.

Beyond that, there are cloud computing services specifically set up to
run HPC workloads.


At a first glance, depending on how big your XML dataset is of course,
this problem looks like a good candidate for 'cycle harvesting' - ie
putting idle desktops to use overnight.
I would ask your IS department if there are any 'Condor pools'
available - that's the jargon phrase.

I'm not sure of the relationship between Birkbeck and UCL (not wishing
to tread on any toes). There are plenty of clusters at UCL.
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug