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

[Michael Sumner]

Barry, *fortunes* are very auspicious but you are already well represented.

Cheers, Mike.

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Whit Armstrong
<armstrong.whit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Michael Sumner
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Hobart, Australia
e-mail: mdsumner at gmail.com