[Chicago] What is cloud computing good for?

[Garrett Smith]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Ed Leafe <ed at leafe.com> wrote:
> On Aug 9, 2010, at 2:00 PM, skip at pobox.com wrote:
>
>> The discussion about colocation and cloud servers got me to wondering about
>> that technology (again).  Is cloud computing useful for compute-intensive
>> tasks or is it designed more to address the slashdot phenomenon (quickly
>> increase the number of outward facing servers as needs arise)?
>
>
>        Those are all valid uses of cloud technology; a better, less buzzword-y term might be 'virtualization'. Servers can be spun up as needed for heavy computation; this is the EC2/NASA model. They can also be provisioned as permanent devices as a replacement for physical servers; that is the Rackspace model. And, of course, you can have everything in between.
>
>        I was talking with some of the NASA developers at the OpenStack conference; a common request for them was to spin up 10,000 servers with a particular image for a particular task, and these servers would exist only a couple of hours until the analysis was done, after which they would be deleted. This would then be repeated for the next scientist who needed to crunch data.

As for the 10K number -- was that on EC2? And did you get the number
of zeros right on that??