Hi everyone.

Thanks for the suggestions. I researched on AMI's and AWS. I have a fair
understanding of how they operate. I just have one doubt.

Is it possible to get something bigger than "Extra Large" Hi-CPU On-Demand
Instance? The point that I am trying to ask is that I can easily run
multiple instances of AMI on AWS but can I somehow pool their resources to
do A LOT of data crunching? (hundreds of GBs)?

To put it simply, rather than 100 hours of work by a single instance, how
can I do the same work in one hour by hundreds of machines?

Regards
Akshay

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Whit Armstrong <armstrong.whit@gmail.com>wrote:

> It is incredibly easy to get started w/ ec2.
>
> 1) pick a base ubuntu from the link that Dirk sent, or a redhat based
> distro if that's your thing
> 2) boot up a micro instance (2 cents per hour, or free for new accounts).
> 3) ssh into the box
> 4) install all the custom R packages you want and any additional
> software w/ apt-get or yum.
> 5) when you're happy with the installed packages and setup, halt the
> box (but do not terminate it)
> 6) in the management console, right click on your instance, and choose
> 'Create Image (EBS AMI)'
> 7) once this process is completed you have your own custom spin with
> its own ami identifier
>
> For the deathstar image I built on Friday, this took about 20 minutes.
>  Far less if you're only installing from apt-get or yum.
>
> Additionally, you can try the AWS.tools package I posted to cran last
> week, which allows launching and terminating instances, and s3
> commands from R.
>
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AWS.tools/index.html
> or
> https://github.com/armstrtw/AWS.tools
>
> fyi, my public image for deathstar is under this ami: ami-9d5f93f4.
>
> Cheers,
> Whit
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 16 October 2011 at 09:19, Sean Davis wrote:
> > | On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Zachary Mayer <zach.mayer@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > | > Could you provide a link to some of these AMIs?  The only only one
> I'm
> > | > aware of is the bioconductor AMI.
> > |
> > | The bioconductor AMI would be a reasonable choice I think.  Here is
> > | another that bundles R:
> > |
> > | http://cloudbiolinux.org/
> >
> > Whit (who is leading a parallel thread here under the 'deathstar' banner
> > covering his R-based AMI tools) and I discussed that in email a few weeks
> > back.  No clear choices dominate but ...
> >
> > | Dirk may be aware of others.  Dirk (I think) also maintains a ton of
> > | R-related debs, so you could probably get away with a pretty standard
> > | debian AMI and simply add R via the normal apt get to get what you
> > | want.
> >
> > ... Ubuntu has builds at http://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami and via another
> link on
> > the EC2 tutorial page at the Ubuntu wiki, and Eric Hammond has a popular
> set
> > too with a server configuration at his http://alestic.net site.
> >
> > I guess curerntly good approaches are to either start from the BioC one
> and
> > strip it down (if you're like and don't do Genomics) or start with the
> basic
> > Ubuntu ones and add packages as Sean suggests. That is the route that
> Whit
> > took.
> >
> > Dirk
> >
> > --
> > "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is
> too
> > dark to read." -- Groucho Marx
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-sig-hpc mailing list
> > R-sig-hpc@r-project.org
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-hpc
> >
>

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