Hi Sean,
Incidentally for anyone that was interested, I did get an Amazon EC2 image ready that reads an S3 file of data, computes recommendations, writes the results, and shuts down. That is truly efficient use of on-demand computing; works nicely. It took some effort to work out how to manage permissions and so on but think I got a decent solution.
Just out of curiosity, can you give an idea of how large your dataset was, how many cpus you used in "the cloud," how long it took, and a rough estimate of the EC2 cost?
Thanks, -steve
