Invisible wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/help/spotrequests.html
>>
>> I always thought that was a very realistic way of working things.
> 
> Permutation City?

Yep. In case my late-night comment was confusing (and it was), I meant I 
thought Permutation City's fictional depiction of spot prices for 
computation sounded very realistic, and here we are a few years later doing 
just that.

> This is an interesting move. As I understand it, an Amazon "instance" is 
> like a virtual machine. So starting and stopping one is quite a lot of 
> work. 

It takes a couple of minutes to do so, yes.

> Not sure what you'd use a VM that could shut down at any random 
> second for...

Hook it to a persistent disk and render an animation? Restart from where you 
left off?  If each frame only takes a minute or two and you are rendering a 
feature-length animation...

Extra responsiveness to read-mostly queries as long as it's cheap enough?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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