Based on my experience moving our search engine to work in the cloud, I would say that it would be easier on users to not actually build a specialized AMI, but rather to make some publicly available S3 resources such as an installation script, jars and tars.
That allows people to install and run mahout not just on a single AMI, but also on any AMI they are running. It also makes it easy for anybody else to use Mahout fairly trivially. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Tim Bass <[email protected]> wrote: > Wow. That is a great idea, Mahout on a Ubuntu Hardy AMI. > > > > On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Grant Ingersoll <[email protected]> > wrote: > > 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 > > > > > > > -- Ted Dunning, CTO DeepDyve 4600 Bohannon Drive, Suite 220 Menlo Park, CA 94025 www.deepdyve.com 650-324-0110, ext. 738 858-414-0013 (m)
