https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/help/spotrequests.html

I always thought that was a very realistic way of working things.

-- 
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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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?

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

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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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Darren New wrote:

>> 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...

I guess it hadn't really registered that it's possible to make an 
instance immediately start doing work as soon as it boots up. I was 
thinking a VM that you're interactively working with isn't much use if 
it's going to die any second...

Interestingly, the documentation for DevPay seems to indicate that I 
could (for example) create an instance, install POV-Ray, and charge 
people money to run this instance, and thereby earn money. I bet it 
wouldn't actually work though.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I guess it hadn't really registered that it's possible to make an 
> instance immediately start doing work as soon as it boots up.

Yes. I have an instance that when it boots it looks to see if there's a 
backup of the wiki files in S3, and if so it installs them. Then it starts 
the wiki server. Every 10 minutes or so, if something has changed it copies 
a backup back to S3.  I still have to restart the instance by hand, because 
they don't actually die unless I screw it up, but it's not hard to make a 
rc.local that runs something.

> Interestingly, the documentation for DevPay seems to indicate that I 
> could (for example) create an instance, install POV-Ray, and charge 
> people money to run this instance, and thereby earn money. I bet it 
> wouldn't actually work though.

I am not sure what "work" means here. It apparently has some troubles, but 
not that much. I was thinking of making one to run my distributed job 
computing software (aka OddJob), but I couldn't figure out all the places 
where my S3 password was stored and such, so I didn't keep chasing it.

-- 
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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>> I guess it hadn't really registered that it's possible to make an 
>> instance immediately start doing work as soon as it boots up.
> 
> Yes. It's not hard to make a rc.local that runs something.

...unless you run a Windows instance. ;-)

>> Interestingly, the documentation for DevPay seems to indicate that I 
>> could (for example) create an instance, install POV-Ray, and charge 
>> people money to run this instance, and thereby earn money. I bet it 
>> wouldn't actually work though.
> 
> I am not sure what "work" means here. It apparently has some troubles, 
> but not that much. I was thinking of making one to run my distributed 
> job computing software (aka OddJob), but I couldn't figure out all the 
> places where my S3 password was stored and such, so I didn't keep 
> chasing it.

I'm thinking more about the following:

1. No sane person is going to pay money to run POV-Ray on Amazon when 
they could just run it locally on their own PC for free.

2. I have a vague recollection that attempting to do this contravines 
the POV-Ray license.

3. If you *were* going to pay money for a POV-Ray rendering engine, you 
wouldn't want to log in, start up a VM, copy all your files onto the 
server, configure all of POV-Ray's options, set it running, and check it 
three times a day to make sure it hasn't finished. (You'll still be 
charged if you don't shut it down as soon as the render is done.)

What you'd *actually* want is a button in POV-Ray that says "submit to 
server" and it grabs all the files, INI files, etc., zips them into a 
big bundle, uploads it, adds it to the server render queue, and emails 
you the result when it's finished or something.

As far as I can tell, it's not possible to do this. Or at least, it's 
not possible to use DevPay to do this. You'd have to have an instance 
running constantly, and you'd have to pay for it whether there's work to 
do or not.

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Invisible wrote:
> ...unless you run a Windows instance. ;-)

Then you use the Windows equivalent, which is a service.

> 1. No sane person is going to pay money to run POV-Ray on Amazon when 
> they could just run it locally on their own PC for free.

Well, no, you have to do more than have just POV-Ray there. For example, you 
could have a mechanism where the person sets up the configuration on their 
own computer, clicks a button that launches 10 Amazon instances and 
distributes frames to them and collects the results, then composes them into 
a video when you're done, after shutting down the instances that were rendering.

> What you'd *actually* want is a button in POV-Ray that says "submit to 
> server" and it grabs all the files, INI files, etc., zips them into a 
> big bundle, uploads it, adds it to the server render queue, and emails 
> you the result when it's finished or something.

Right.

> As far as I can tell, it's not possible to do this. Or at least, it's 
> not possible to use DevPay to do this. You'd have to have an instance 
> running constantly, and you'd have to pay for it whether there's work to 
> do or not.

I don't understand why you'd say that. It works OK for me. I just never got 
around to doing the button that launches the instance, altho having it read 
the configuration and go from there works fine.


-- 
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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>> ...unless you run a Windows instance. ;-)
> 
> Then you use the Windows equivalent, which is a service.

Well, yeah, or whatever.

>> 1. No sane person is going to pay money to run POV-Ray on Amazon when 
>> they could just run it locally on their own PC for free.
> 
> Well, no, you have to do more than have just POV-Ray there.

Agreed.

>> As far as I can tell, it's not possible to do this. Or at least, it's 
>> not possible to use DevPay to do this. You'd have to have an instance 
>> running constantly, and you'd have to pay for it whether there's work 
>> to do or not.
> 
> I don't understand why you'd say that. It works OK for me.

As far as I can tell, DevPay lets you earn money for anything that's 
just an AMI. If it isn't an AMI, but some application that *runs* an 
instance as part of its operation, DevPay isn't applicable.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> As far as I can tell, DevPay lets you earn money for anything that's 
> just an AMI. If it isn't an AMI, but some application that *runs* an 
> instance as part of its operation, DevPay isn't applicable.

You'd have to launch the instance with your AMI, yes. You get paid for 
people running your AMI.

-- 
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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>> As far as I can tell, DevPay lets you earn money for anything that's 
>> just an AMI. If it isn't an AMI, but some application that *runs* an 
>> instance as part of its operation, DevPay isn't applicable.
> 
> You'd have to launch the instance with your AMI, yes. You get paid for 
> people running your AMI.

Granted I haven't read the detailed documentation. But it looks like you 
can put together an AMI and list it on Amazon's website with "hey, you 
can run this thing for $2/hour". But that would mean that to use your 
AMI, somebody would have to select it, start it up, copy their files 
onto it, launch POV-Ray and tell it to render.

If you wanted to be able to submit renders from your PC and have them 
automatically run, you'd have to have an instance constantly running, 
waiting for work to be submitted. Which means that when there's no work 
in the queue, you're paying money for an idle instance to run. And even 
when there is work, DevPay doesn't appear to offer a way to charge money 
for submitting a job to a queue, only for physically starting an AMI.

Assuming I've understood the documentation correctly anyway...

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