Has anyone tried using a third party cloud platform to crunch Seti?

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Has anyone tried using a third party cloud platform to crunch Seti?

There was a discussion of this idea last November, about Amazon's EC2 service.

Try looking here:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=59977&nowrap=true#995935

(Sorry, I'm still learning some of the tricks of these boards).

The consensus was that BOINC IS a form of cloud computing, and it's "free", so why pay for a third-party commercial service?

The consensus was that BOINC IS a form of cloud computing, and it's "free", so why pay for a third-party commercial service?

If you have subscription to such service and at some time you have no own tasks, why not use it then just as uses own PC for BOINC when PC idle.

Utilizing the Amazon EC2 platform costs 12 cents an hour. That seems far cheaper than the money I have invested in hardware and electricity not to mention the time spent on preventative maintenance keeping the farm alive.

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The consensus was that BOINC IS a form of cloud computing, and it's "free", so why pay for a third-party commercial service?

If you have subscription to such service and at some time you have no own tasks, why not use it then just as uses own PC for BOINC when PC idle.

Does not work that way, Raistmer. Cloud computing companies are not BONC projects, they are like the people who DO the computing for a BOINC project.

A company offering cloud computing services charges you money to do your computing projects, or store your data, on their computers. They do not give you a part of somebody else's computing work to do.

Utilizing the Amazon EC2 platform costs 12 cents an hour. That seems far cheaper than the money I have invested in hardware and electricity not to mention the time spent on preventative maintenance keeping the farm alive.

So you built a network of computers for the sole purpose of running Seti@Home (and/or other BONC projects), and you are wondering if it would have cost YOU less to use a cloud computing service than what it cost to build and run your own network. That is a question only YOU can answer, since either way YOU are donating the money and computing time to the project. Besides the personal gratification of helping S@H and the other BOINC projects you support, why did you spend the money to build your cruncher farm? Was it worth it?

For me, it makes no sense, and defeats the purpose of being involved with a BOINC project. I have two old Mac G4's that get used for other things part of the day, but are powered up 24/7. I keep them on so they are ready when I want/need to use them. As long as they are on, I run S@H to do something I consider useful. Being semi-retired, I can't afford to build and operate extra, state-of-the-art, multiple-gpu-equiped crunchers just for running BOINC projects. My summer power bills are high enough as it is.

For the Seti@Home or other BOINC projects, it is a no-brainer. If they had the funding to run their projects on a commercial cloud-computing system (or even a university system), they wouldn't need BOINC.

The consensus was that BOINC IS a form of cloud computing, and it's "free", so why pay for a third-party commercial service?

If you have subscription to such service and at some time you have no own tasks, why not use it then just as uses own PC for BOINC when PC idle.

Does not work that way, Raistmer. Cloud computing companies are not BONC projects, they are like the people who DO the computing for a BOINC project.

A company offering cloud computing services charges you money to do your computing projects, or store your data, on their computers. They do not give you a part of somebody else's computing work to do.

Better re-read my post.

If they had the funding to run their projects on a commercial cloud-computing system (or even a university system), they wouldn't need BOINC.

Wrong assumption. Not they but some of BOINC participants.
Some peoples here have their own CPU demanding modeling stuff BTW, own clusters and so forth. So some of them can have subscription on services (not exactly Amazon ones, I see only half-subscription there) but cloud computing will grow, very possible some companies will provide flat rate tarifs as we have now for internet (many peoples forgot how to pay for each magabyte of downloaded/uploaded traffic).
Then when cloud computing subscriber not use his account for his own needs why not to load cloud with SETI/BOINC for example, he paid for access so has right to do this.
That is the way cloud computing really can help SETI. Via SETI's participants, not SETI project staff.

If they had the funding to run their projects on a commercial cloud-computing system (or even a university system), they wouldn't need BOINC.

Wrong assumption. Not they but some of BOINC participants.
Some peoples here have their own CPU demanding modeling stuff BTW, own clusters and so forth. So some of them can have subscription on services (not exactly Amazon ones, I see only half-subscription there) but cloud computing will grow, very possible some companies will provide flat rate tarifs as we have now for internet (many peoples forgot how to pay for each magabyte of downloaded/uploaded traffic).
Then when cloud computing subscriber not use his account for his own needs why not to load cloud with SETI/BOINC for example, he paid for access so has right to do this.

Okay, now I see what you mean. I thought you were talking about getting work from the cloud company, like you would go to another BOINC project when S@H goes down or runs out of work.

Yes, if you already have a subscription to a cloud service, and want to use it for Seti@Home (or another BOINC project) when you are not using it for your business needs, and you are willing and able to pay the costs, sure, why not? It's your money being spent, not S@H's. You would just need to make sure there was a S@H client that would run on the cloud company's computers.

That is the way cloud computing really can help SETI. Via SETI's participants, not SETI project staff.

That is exactly the point I was making in my last paragraph, and in my first reply to mmarrs. BOINC IS cloud computing, and BOINC projects get our computing services for "free", so it makes no sense for them to pay a commercial cloud service.

1 big advantage of clouding is that the HDD is freed up purely for a chuckable, reinstallable OS on the host machine, with no files to worry about as they are on the cloud. Combining cloud + BOINC would be a solution of the files that are downloaded to the HDD - which are at risk of loss in case of OS/hardware malfunction - are safer.

Yesno?

1 big advantage of clouding is that the HDD is freed up purely for a chuckable, reinstallable OS on the host machine, with no files to worry about as they are on the cloud. Combining cloud + BOINC would be a solution of the files that are downloaded to the HDD - which are at risk of loss in case of OS/hardware malfunction - are safer.

Yesno?

Yeah, it is sorta like going back to the old days of application servers and dumb terminals.
In a semi-related note. I did spend some time a while back trying to figure out how to get BOINC/S@H to run on a Windows HPC cluster, but didn't have much luck.

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