Hi There was a thread on cluster and distributed computing earlier. It was in the context of some of you possibly needing huge computer resource (bandwidth, storage space and/or raw processing power) for a short amount of time and . Check out Amazon's S3 and EC2 web services. To test out your ideas without having to worry about setting up a PC cluster or paying for huge computer resources which you only need briefly to test out ideas, their EC2 initiative Elastic Compute Cloud of Amazon.com and related webservices (e.g. S3 for storage) seems ideal. "Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011]"; Sample costs are: $0.10 - per hour "Small Instance" computer time [7.5 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform - Linux]
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out // $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out // $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB Storage (S3 service): $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used (with Data Transfer from $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in, $.10-.18 out) If you want to do text mining on the web, you can use Alexa's related webservice (eg allowing for 'million query research results' mining). (Note: I don't earn commission on this nor do I have any relations to Amazon :) I haven't tested them out (yet) but their main development centre is right around the corner from me. Jean-Paul Van Belle Associate Professor Head: Postgraduate Section, Department of Information Systems ( http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/InformationSystems/ ) Research Associate: Centre for IT and National Development in Africa (CITANDA) ( http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/Organisations/CITANDA/ ) The IS Dept is co-hosting ZA-WWW'08 ( http://www.zaw3.co.za/ ) Contact details: phone +27-21-6504256; fax +27-21-6502280; office LC 4.21 ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
