The first time I heard about Amazon’s EC2 service, I was struck by the thought that very soon a biotech company, with modest computing needs would not need to have a datacenter with a big cluster, but rather use a service like EC2 to satisfy it’s computing needs. A couple of weeks ago I asked Charlie Bell about EC2 and MPI, and guess what, it’s doable. Jeff Barr blogs about EC2, Mpich2 and Blast. Perfect!!! Now, mind you, if you are in the situation where you are crunching the entire human genome all the time, a dedicated cluster is worth it. But if you are a company that usually runs small jobs and occasionally needs the big spike in compute power, the EC2/S3 combo is quite intriguing and I have a feeling it would be fairly cost effective.
Further Reading:
Supercomputing 2006
Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, Bioinformatics, MPI, BLAST
4 Comments
That is really cool. It really depends on the costs but factoring in the IT support it might very well pay off for many research institutes.
That is really cool. It really depends on the costs but factoring in the IT support it might very well pay off for many research institutes.
One of the advantages for going this route is that a company doesn’t have to worry about maintaining a big server farm. As Charlie said when he was talking about it “let us take care of all the muck”
One of the advantages for going this route is that a company doesn't have to worry about maintaining a big server farm. As Charlie said when he was talking about it “let us take care of all the muck”
4 Trackbacks
[...] Further reading Peakstream bets farm on CPU/GPU fusion Computing in the cloud Accelerated computing – the floodgates [...]
[...] Further reading: Computing in the cloud IBM deep computing on demand for the life sciences [...]
[...] Further reading: Computing in the cloud IBM deep computing on demand for the life sciences [...]
[...] Further reading: Computing in the cloud IBM deep computing on demand for the life sciences [...]