A key financial advantage of cloud computing over onsite computing is elasticity: Cloud computing power and storage resources can be provisioned on-demand at virtually any size. This ability of clouds to elastically allocate resources makes performing large-scale data processing and analytic jobs cost-effective.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) evolves constantly. In 2015 Amazon announced over 700 AWS updates, typically new and modified features or novel pricing mechanisms. When AWS functionalities evolve, so do cost-effective cloud solutions on AWS. A solution that used to offer low costs a year ago doesn’t necessarily do so today. Let’s go over three examples.
StarCluster is developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for scientific HPC computing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It supports building HPC clusters based on the Open Grid Scheduler, previously Sun Grid Engine, or HTCondor, a high throughput computing environment previously known as Condor.
Cloud Monitor is a secure web application that ingests raw EC2 Watch feeds and provides the customer with access to interactive reports on:
The BidElastic team published an article in a special issue of Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory. The article describes some of the technology and principles used by Bid Server to plan and provision EC2 spot instances.