Tag: cloud computing

Amazon CC2 – The Big Cloud is finally here

Finally a powerful enough cloud computing instance from Amazon EC2 – called CC2 priced at 3$ per hour (for Windows instances) and 2.4$/hour for Linux

It would be interesting to see how SAS, IBM SPSS or R can leverage these

Storage – On the storage front, the CC2 instance type is packed with 60.5 GB of RAM and 3.37 TB of instance storage.

Processing – The CC2 instance type includes 2 Intel Xeon processors, each with 8 hardware cores. We’ve enabled Hyper-Threading, allowing each core to process a pair of instruction streams in parallel. Net-net, there are 32 hardware execution threads and you can expect 88 EC2 Compute Units (ECU’s) from this 64-bit instance type

On a somewhat smaller scale, you can launch your own array of 290 CC2 instances and create a Top500 supercomputer (63.7 teraFLOPS) at a cost of less than $1000 per hour

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/11/next-generation-cluster-computing-on-amazon-ec2-the-cc2-instance-type.html

 

 

and

http://aws.amazon.com/hpc-applications/

 

 

Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large specifications:
88 EC2 Compute Units (Eight-core 2 x Intel Xeon)
60.5 GB of memory
3370 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cc2.8xlarge
Price: Starting from $2.40 per hour

But some caveats

  • The instances are available in a single Availability Zone in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. We plan to add capacity in other EC2 Regions throughout 2012.
  • You can run 2 CC2 instances by default.
  • You cannot currently launch instances of this type within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Preview- Google Cloud SQL

From –http://code.google.com/apis/sql/

What is Google Cloud SQL?

Google Cloud SQL is web service that allows you to create, configure, and use relational databases with your App Engine applications. It is a fully-managed service that maintains, manages, and administers your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services.

By offering the capabilities of a MySQL database, the service enables you to easily move your data, applications, and services into and out of the cloud. This allows for high data portability and helps in faster time-to-market because you can quickly leverage your existing database (using JDBC and/or DB-API) in your App Engine application.

Here is where you can get an invite to the beta only Google Cloud SQL

Sign up for Limited Preview

Google Cloud SQL is available to a limited number of users. To sign up for the service:

  1. Visit the Google APIs Console. The console opens the All services pane.
  2. Find the SQL Service line in the Services table and click Request access…
  3. Fill out the enrollment form.
  4. Our team will review your enrollment information and respond by email to the address associated with your Google Account.
  5. Follow the link in the email to view the Terms of Service. Please read these carefully before accepting.
  6. Sign up for the google-cloud-sql-announce group to receive important announcements and product news. (NOTE- Members: 384)
and after all that violence and double talk, a walk in the clouds with SQL.
1. There are three kinds of instances in the beta view
2. Wait for the Instance to be created note- the Design of the Interface uptil now is much better than Amazon’s.  
Note you need to have an appspot application from Google Apps and can choose between the Python and Java versions. Quite clearly there is a play for other languages too. I think GO is also supported.
3. You can import your data from your Google Storage bucket
4. I am not that hot at coding or maybe the interface was too pretty. Anyways- the log tells me that import of the text file has failed from Google Storage to Google Cloud SQL 
5. Incidentally the Google Cloud Storage interface is also much better than the Amazon GUI for transferring data- Note I was using the classical statistical dataset Boston Housing Data as the test case. 
6. The SQL prompt is the weakest part of the design process of the Interphase. There is no Query builder and the SELECT FROM WHERE prompt is slightly amusing/ insulting . I mean guys either throw in a fully fledged GUI for query builder similar to the MYSQL Workbench , than create a pretty white command prompt.
7. You can also export your data back to your Google Storage bucket 
These are early days, and I am trying to see if there is a play for some cloud kind of ODBC action between R, Prediction API , and the cloud SQL… so try it out yourself at http://code.google.com/apis/sql/ and see if there is any juice you can build  here.

Interesting announcement from PiCloud

An interesting announcement from PiCloud who is a cloud computing startup, but focused on python (as the name suggests). They basically have created a cloud library (or in R lingo – a package) that enables you to call cloud power sitting from the desktop interface itself. This announcement is for multiple IP addresses. Real parallel processing or just a quick trick in technical jargon- you decide!

  1. Prepare
  2. Run
  3. Monitor
Prepare

s1 cores are comparable in performance to c1 cores with one extra trick up their sleeve: each job running in parallel will have a different IP.

Why is this important?
Using unique IPs is necessary to minimize the automated throttling most sites will impose when seeing fast, repeated access from a single IP.

How do I use it?
If you’re already using our c1 cores, all you’ll need to do is set the _type keyword.

cloud.call(func, _type=’s1′)

How much?
$0.04/core/hour

Why don’t other cores have individual IPs?
For other core types, such as c2, multiple cores may be running on a single machine that is assigned only a single IP address. When using s1 cores, you’re guaranteed that each core sits on a different machine.

 

http://www.picloud.com/

Interview Markus Schmidberger ,Cloudnumbers.com

Here is an interview with Markus Schmidberger, Senior Community Manager for cloudnumbers.com. Cloudnumbers.com is the exciting new cloud startup for scientific computing. It basically enables transition to a R and other platforms in the cloud and makes it very easy and secure from the traditional desktop/server model of operation.

Ajay- Describe the startup story for setting up Cloudnumbers.com

Markus- In 2010 the company founders Erik Muttersbach (TU München), Markus Fensterer (TU München) and Moritz v. Petersdorff-Campen (WHU Vallendar) started with the development of the cloud computing environment. Continue reading “Interview Markus Schmidberger ,Cloudnumbers.com”

Cloud Computing using Python

I liked the new features in PiCloud , which is a cloud computing way to use Python. Python is increasingly popular as a computational language, and the cloud is the way where HW is headed to atleast as of 2011-12

http://www.picloud.com/

The new features allows you to publish your own functions as urls.

 By publishing your Python functions to URLs. Why would you want to publish a function?

  • To call your Python functions from a programming language other than Python.
  • To use PiCloud from Google AppEngine, which does not support our native client library.
  • To easily setup a scalable RPC system.

Here’s a peek at the interface:

You publish a Python function

cloud.rest.publish(your_func, ‘myfunction’)

We give you a URL Back

https://api.picloud.com/r/2/myfunction/

You make an HTTP request using your method of choice to the URL

curl -k -u ‘key:secret_key’ https://api.picloud.com/r/2/myfunction/

It certainly is an interesting development and I am wondering how other languages can adopt this paradigm as well.
For R, as of now http://www.cloudnumbers.com/ seems to be the only player in the cloud.
It would be exciting to see more players in the cloud statistical analytical space.

 

Cloud Computing by Windows , Amazon and Google for free

Some ways to test and use cloud computing for free for yourself-

  1. Windows Azure
  2. Amazon Ec2
  3. Google Storage

The folks at Microsoft Azure announced a 90 day free trial Continue reading “Cloud Computing by Windows , Amazon and Google for free”

Running R Studio on a cloud computer for #rstats

So I decided to test the next iteration of http://cloudnumbers.com and I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to start a Linux Cluster and start doing #Rstats computing

on the cloud using R Studio.

Here are some screenshots of my journey.

 

 

 

Register here if you like it-

https://my.cloudnumbers.com/register/65E97A