Sven Littkowski wrote:
> can you give me some details about those Amazon machines? How and where to 
> gain more information on that? How to contact that company?

Go to www.amazonaws.com. (That's Amazon's Web Services, see...)

On the left edge, they list all the web services they supply. Two are 
most notable for people not doing electronic commerce stuff:

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (also known as S3) lets you store 
arbitrary amounts of data out on Amazon's servers for small amounts of 
money (relatively speaking). There are a number of client libraries and 
programs that make it easy to get to it, and so on. (Jungle Disk is 
decent, if you want something that works better than a demo and you want 
to treat the storage like a disk.)

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (also known as ECC) allows you to start 
up a machine running Linux, load it with an operating system stored on 
Amazon S3 (either by you, by Amazon, or by someone else making their 
OS-configuration available to you), and run it. They ten cents per hour 
per CPU (about a 1.x GHz CPU IIRC). You can also rent multi-CPU 
configurations for a multiple of that. (Actually, it used to be twenty 
cents per hour - I wonder what happened.)

It's really pretty easy to set up compared to anything else I've seen. 
You need to have access to SSH (such as putty under Windows). Getting 
the Java command-line stuff working with the right environment variables 
was the hardest part. Once you manage to fire up an "instance" and get 
yourself logged in, it's just a normal remote computer running Linux. 
Follow carefully the instructions in the "getting started" tutorial and 
you'll be online in half an hour.

If you want to do something manually, you can just fire up a machine, 
remote login, scp povray onto it, start it up, and when it finishes, 
copy the results off and shut down the machine.

I've also written a programm I call "oddjob" that lets you set up a 
collection of jobs to be done (e.g., povray image traces for an 
animation), and the program will coordinate N different machines all 
peeking into the list of jobs, pulling down the data files, running the 
program, and storing the data files back into S3, and then shutting down 
the machines as the number of jobs runs out.  I haven't released it yet, 
but only because I haven't had time to set up any sample ECC "images." 
I.e., the program works, but actually firing up the Amazon computers is 
still manual. I'm happy to share the code with you, but it's not really 
targeting what you're talking about here, which is something that's hard 
to distribute amongst multiple machines.

Paying for it is as easy as paying for something you order from Amazon. 
You even use the same account you already have with them, and just pick 
how you want them to bill your credit card at the end of the month. If 
your credit card is funky, be aware they *will* actually charge you 
three cents if that's how much of their services you use. Kind of 
strange, but I guess they do enough traffic to get special contracts 
with their Visa and Mastercard providers and all[*].


[*] Or they bought their own bank, which was one of the suggestions made 
by an investor early in my career. When everyone at the table twitched, 
he added "you can get some small banks quite reasonably these days."

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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