One of the nice things about the cloud is being able to horizontally get what you want, as long as you either have servers on the other end or a wallet if you don’t.
I’ve always dug projects like BOINC and folding@home. And of course, our never ending search for ET. To me the best part is of course the leaderboards on how you’re competing with everyone else. Look at this subforum on Ars Technica as an example.
“But what if I could just rent enough public cloud capacity to pass my smug competition? In the name of science of course.”
Well, let’s see, we do have HVM Compute Cluster AMIs for Ubuntu. You can just search for “hvm” in our handy dandy AMI browser. These instance from Amazon can be pretty performant, and even offer GPU crunching. But at $2.40 an hour, too rich for my blood.
However if you look at the spot instances of the Eight Extra Large, right now it’s at 56 cents. Now this is much more interesting, I wonder how much bang for the buck I can get out of this. But I don’t want to spend too much (yet).
I saw a six pack of soda-pop for $1.20. That price f—s with your head, man. Because then I though that I would start selling soda-pop. Suddenly I got things of pop with me. “What’s going on, Mitch.” “Not much, looking to buy some pop? Fifty cents a can. It’s not refridgerated because this is a half assed commitment.”
Mitch Hedberg Comedian
Hmm so maybe I don’t even need the computing instances, if it’s just CPU bound then maybe it’s not worth the extra cost for all the other high end things those instances provide. Or I can at least estimate my price-performance ratio with whatever BOINC project I am interested in. Either way I think it would be cool if we had juju charms for these projects so that people can experiment with deploying all these interesting scientific things on the cloud in an easy way. People are already running BOINC on EC2, but with a charm we can just have it in Ubuntu out of the box, no need to have someone maintaining a separate AMI for this when we can just have it. And with juju and config options in charms we could just control the clients through the same interface that we can control any other juju service. And of course, since it’s in the charm store it means we can deploy on bare metal and OpenStack. What a nice way to break in all that shiny new hardware.
So I’ve filed two bugs, one for BOINC, and one for Folding@home. Bruno has snagged BOINC as he plans on entering it in the Charm Contest, but folding is still up for grabs.
Though the projects in BOINC and FAH are relatively familiar to us I think it’d be interesting to think of all the HPC software that is out there that needs computing power and how you can tie that into an easily deployable juju charm. Spot instance price just drop and make renting out the time economically valuable for you? juju add-unit -n50 myproject. Prices go up? juju remove-unit -n50 myproject. Your funding finally come through for your own resources? Redeploy locally. Or start locally and scale up on the public cloud based on what you need.
Are there other computational tasks you think can be deployed this way? Let me know in the comments, or feel free to charm it up and submit it to the juju charm contest.