[OT]: PiCloud - really cool!

[geremy condra]

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 5:29 PM, James Mills
<prologic at shortcircuit.net.au> wrote:
> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:19 AM, geremy condra <debatem1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was the poster across from them at PyCon two years back. Pretty fun
>> to play with, although last I checked it was hard to do true HPC on
>> it.
>
> Why's that ? And what is true HPC (High Performance Computing) anyway ?
> I find the API provided to be quite simple robust and potentially very
> powerful - depending on your application.

Last time I checked- and again, it's been a while- you were basically
just able to run some (probably computationally bound) function on an
EC2 instance that they managed for you without having any of the muss
and fuss of doing it yourself. That's very cool, but there are
problems where you really need more horsepower than a normal EC2
instance can provide, and if your application crosses that boundary
after you've written it against PiCloud you're probably in the same
hole you would have been without PiCloud. The other limitation is with
problems that take a lot of input data, where it's more time intensive
to ship the data across to EC2 than it is to just process it locally.

Once more for effect: I haven't played with this in a while, the guys
who built it seem pretty sharp, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to
find out that they have ways of dealing with this better now.

Geremy Condra