105 Ghz for $8.40
I haven’t posted in months and noticed that my last post was just me bragging about having access to a 13 node XGrid… so, to restart the blog on the same theme, I can now boast about using a 105 Ghz cluster for only $8.40 an hour.
My bayesian network software, pebl, can use Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform to create ad-hoc clusters, run code on them and then terminate them once finished. I needed to do some bootstrap learning for a project but it would’ve taken hundreds of hours on my lab desktop and our XGrid was busy. Being prone to both procrastination and impatience, I decided to use Amazon and was able to run my code within a day for only $55. That’s peanuts compared to the amount spent to generate the data I’m analyzing (tens of thousands of dollars) or required to buy and maintain your own cluster (again, tens of thousands).
But the coolest part:
With the current results, I can calculate p-values with three significant digits but I can quote exactly how much it would cost to get additional significant digits!
I think cloud computing will become a big part of scientific computing in the near future, especially for small labs or students who want to test out a hunch without writing up a formal grant. I’ve created an open source project, anyCloud, to take some of this code from pebl and make it more generally applicable for any python code. It’s in a very early stage but if you’re interested in helping out, I’d appreciate it.
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