Amazon EC2 Considered Harmful

Posted by Peter Skomoroch on April 18th 2007 to Cluster Computing, Python, MPI, Amazon EC2, buses, georgetown, XP

“The TruckNumber is the size of the smallest set of people in a project such that, if all of them got hit by a truck, the project would be in trouble.” - Portland Pattern Repository

bigbus

I’m taking an “Introduction to Beowulf Design” course this week from the Georgetown University Advanced Research Computing (ARC) division. The class definitely hasn’t been boring. By a strange coincidence, it turns out that the guy sitting next to me is Mike Cariaso, an MPIBlast developer who I have been corresponding with this month in some nodalpoint posts. The course gave us an opportunity to hash out some details around running MPI on EC2. He had just booted up a 10 node Amazon EC2 cluster with MPIBlast when a bus crashed into our building…

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