Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service

RebornData writes "I receieved an e-mail this morning inviting me to participate in a limited beta of Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It's a grid computing service that allows you to create and upload your own Linux-based machine images and run them in Amazon's system, starting at $.10 per "instance hour" (each machine instance being equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM, and 160GB disk). You can use their tools to create and start new instances dynamically to meet whatever your particular capacity needs are at any given moment. Fedora Core 3 and 4 are explicitly supported, but any distro based on the 2.6 kernel should work. The service documentation provides more technical details. Unfortunately, it appears that the beta is limited to existing Amazon S3 users, and is already full."

Comments

Grid?

[lbmouse]

Anyone else getting tired off all this Web 2.0 (tm) terminology?... "Compute cloud", "Grid computing service", etc. Every time I see this, I think Gay-Related Immune Deficiency computing service. Guess I'm showing my age. Anyone else remember the diet candy called Ayds?... wow, bet the marketing guys at that company had coronaries after the CDC press release. It's not good when a government agency names a fatal syndrome after your product.

With X11, any process is griddable

[Colin Smith]

Network storage, a few wrapper scripts and you're away. Kick off pretty much any GUI app on "the grid" and have it plonk it's interface back on your display. With something like GridEngine you can designate some of the machines as OpenOffice servers, others as Thunderbird servers to take better advantage of shared libraries, filesystem buffers and CPU caches, or you can just have everything kick off on the least loaded machines. The result is that the user's GUI apps could be running on a dozen different machines completely transparently.

With Windows of course, your extra machines might as well be doorstops.