> I haven't had time to concern myself with computer-Go the past years.

I've also not been following the list the past 6+ months, but your mail
subject caught my eye.

> these days. And I noticed they're not billing us for the micro
> instances. We mostly use their "large" instances anyway. It turns out
> for the first year Amazon doesn't charge for a micro instance. 
> ...
> I didn't really have a clue as to how fast these micro instances are
> so while I had a little time I decided to give it a little spin.

They provide a "little" CPU, but allow it to burst to 2 ECUs. [1]
The more expensive "small" instance offers 1 ECU.

> Libego. It reported 27kpps and 10kpps per Ghz. This seems to point to
> a 2.66Ghz processor underneath. Not terribly exciting, but not too

I think you got a burst there; 1 ECU is very roughly 1 Ghz of an Xeon.

So, the micro instance would be too unreliable for a computer go
competition.

The small instance costs $0.085/hour ($0.12/hour on windows). So if each
game takes 50 minutes (leaving 10 minutes for setup), and you play 10
games in your tournament, it will cost someone $0.85 ($1.20 for
Windows-only programs) to enter the tournament.
Not unreasonable; the cool thing is everyone could set up 10 small
instances and all rounds could be played simultaneously :-)

Downsides are that that is not much CPU, so level of play is going to be
low.

Darren

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance



-- 
Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer

http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work)
http://dcook.org/blogs.html (My blogs and articles)
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