[R] What is the most cost effective hardware for R?

[Whit Armstrong]

I don't work for Amazon, but here is one of their promo pieces on
using 'spot' instances:
http://youtu.be/WD9N73F3Fao

at about 2:15, they cite University of Melbourne and Universitat de
Barcelona as customers...

My interest in all this cloud talk is that I'll be presenting a
tutorial on R in the cloud at R/Finance.
http://www.rinfinance.com/agenda/

It's really easy to use R in the cloud, even if you don't want to move
your data into s3.

-Whit



On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Barry Rowlingson
<b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 2:22 PM, John Laing <john.laing at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For 200,000 analyses at 1.5 seconds each, you're looking at ~83 hours
>> of computing time. You can buy time from Amazon at roughly $0.08 /
>> core / hour, so it would cost about $7 to run your analyses in the
>> cloud. Assuming complete parallelization you could fire up as many
>> machines as you need to get the work done in as little time as you
>> want, with the same fixed cost. I think that's a pretty compelling
>> argument, compared to the hassles of buying and maintaining hardware,
>> power supply, air conditioning, etc.
>
>  Noticing Hugh's .ac.uk email address you do have to factor in the
> hassle of getting something as nebulous as cloud computing past the
> red tape. "How much will it cost?" says the bureaucrat. "Depends how
> much CPU time I need", says the academic. "So potentially, what's the
> most?" says the bureaucrat. "Millions,", says the academic, honestly,
> adding "but that would only be if my job scheduling went a bit mad and
> grabbed a few thousand Amazon cores and thrashed them for weeks
> without me noticing". "Okay", says the bureaucrat, "now, can we send
> Amazon a purchase order so that Amazon send us an invoice for this
> unknown and potentially unpredictable cost first?". "Oh no", says the
> academic, "we need a credit card...".
>
> Maybe there are other ways of paying for Amazon cloud CPUs, I've not
> investigated. Anyone in academia happily crunching on EC2?
>
> Barry
>
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