We love finding more bloggers talking about the potential for cloud computing with Matlab like computation. Paul Gribble at GribbleLab has a post on high performance computing in the cloud where he details some of his computational requirements for arm simulations (24-36hr runs on whatever machines he can grab, 8-10 at a time max).
He also notes it would be cool if he could instead run many Amazon EC2 instances. (And he can, see our earlier post). But this clearly illustrates the problem – why should Paul have to beg borrow and steal computational resources when they already exist (and wouldn’t have to run overnight when the desktops aren’t otherwise in use, etc).
Paul’s commenters note that Amazon has limits to its scale, and 10k CPUs isn’t accessible anytime soon, but the principle is sound and we’re here to help Paul and others with similar needs get there simply and quickly.