

Ask HN: What would you do with 1,000 free EC2 hours on AWS? 1,000,0000? - Maro

Thinking about batch jobs.
======
mark_l_watson
Amazon gave me the equivalent of 10,000 free hours on a small EC2 instance
when I was working on my last book. I used a few hours of this to prepare a
custom AMI with all of the examples in my book set up with Ubuntu and all
required infrastructure. I'll be able to keep updated book example AMIs in S3
_forever_ now without it costing me any money out of pocket.

I also used some of this free time to do a 4 day machine learning run on all
current English Wikipedia articles.

I will always create an AMI for all of my future books - awesome for readers
to be able to have everything all set up. Also, they can clone my AMI, and
have a fast start to deploying anything in my book that they want to use for
their own projects.

For Amazon, this seems like viral marketing at its best :-)

I think that it was very savvy of Amazon to do this because I ended up writing
a lot of material in the book on using Amazon AWS (Elastic MapReduce, S3,
etc.). I now spend lots of time experimenting and blogging about AWS, and I
ask my customers to host on AWS because I am now so used to using it.

I used to host customer work on VPSs or cheap dedicated servers, but now
Amazon is definitely my deployment platform first choice and recommendation.
(BTW, I host some of my own stuff on AppEngine because it is even cheaper, but
the extra effort of dealing with AppEngine makes it not as attractive for
customer projects.)

~~~
devicenull
Seems like that was a very small cost for Amazon to pay to get your support :)

------
human_v2
This is what I would do, but you'd need some prerequisite software and
information:

1\. Get a genome for the simplest bacteria you can find. 2\. You'd need
molecular simulation software, specifically DNA and cells

After you've gotten this, I would strip out pieces of the genome using the
genetic algorithm (oh the irony) and see if you can slim the genome down to a
bare-bones replicating cellular machine.

After that, just a little trial and error and you could be making designer
organisms.

(Sorry if you wanted something realistic. My brain doesn't work like that =)

~~~
Maro
".. slim the genome down to a bare-bones replicating cellular machine .."

That sounds interesting from a computational perspective. Any good papers to
read? "Designer organisms" also sounds interesting...

------
petercooper
1\. Set up a cloud hosting company. 2. ??? 3. Profit!

Seriously, though, probably build a Web indexer/search engine. I seem to keep
coming back to the idea every few years and EC2 makes it possible - a million
free hours would get me 114 instances for a year, long enough to prove whether
any of several new approaches is worthwhile or not.

~~~
_pius
You may find 80Legs worth checking out.

~~~
jdrock
1M free hours on EC2 = 2.67M free hours on 80legs!

------
cperciva
I don't know what I'd do with 10^3 hours, but with 10^6 hours I'd calculate 5
trillion digits of Pi -- until now this sort of computation has always been
done on supercomputers, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be possible to
do it on EC2.

------
tzury
I would donate it to the open source community. I mean asking this question
here suggest that you got nothing better to do with it, right?

~~~
Maro
I don't actually have free hours on EC2 or ~$100,000 for 1,000,000 hours. With
EC2 lots of computational tasks become accessible to the average person, and I
posted here on HN to get an interesting conversation going.

------
mark_ellul
I would work on my dream/future project of creating software that functions
like the human brain!

------
tomjen2
A thousand hours is just above 10 days (assuming you run on a single CPU), so
I guess most of us have a spare computer lying about which means that it
should be able to handle this data.

As for the 1,000,000 hours? A genetic algorithm that runs through all the
publically available data on deals made by the government looking for anything
out of the ordinary to flesh out corruption.

~~~
smanek
Am I missing something? 1000 hrs /(24 hrs/day) = 41.67 days

And I don't think 'genetic algorithm' means what you think it means. All a GA
does is try to find the max/min of some function. It is basically just hill
climbing with a bit of randomness and a catchy name.

To find 'fishy' transactions you would use some sort of unsupervised machine
learning algorithm to identify patterns/clusters in data (and that's starting
an entirely different discussion).

~~~
tomjen2
You are right on both counts. I mentally misplaced the comma somewhere, but
the point that that machine is no more powerful that what I guess most people
here have stacked around somewhere.

As for the generic algorithm, you are _also_ right.

