Sounds cool. On a related note, it has always been my intent to put
up Mahout as an AMI, similar to what Hadoop does, to make it easy for
people to get started w/ Mahout.
On Feb 1, 2009, at 5:45 PM, Sean Owen wrote:
I had a thought. After looking at Amazon's most excellent EC2 system
again I realized how simple it would be to offer batch recommendations
via EC2. You upload your data to S3, run a machine image I provide
parameterized with the file location, it crunches, copies the results
back, shuts down. It's attractive since they offer 8-way 15GB machines
and the algorithms can easily exploit this to the limit, making it
really efficient too.
I was thinking of developing an AMI for this separately and offering
it as a for-pay commercial service -- Amazon makes that pretty easy.
(It would hardly be a big money maker -- a couple dollars per hour is
probably the highest reasonable price to charge -- but would sorta pay
for its own development.)
I think it will be interesting to try as a proof of concept. It's a
solution that still doesn't scale to huge data sets, but I think a
15GB machine would still work for large-ish data sets (~100M ratings)
and its exactly those small- to medium-sized applications for which it
might make sense to outsource this.
Sean
