[Chicago] What is cloud computing good for?

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    Massimo> If you are not interested in web apps (and looks like you are
    Massimo> not) you may be interested in this:

    Massimo> http://www.picloud.com/

You are correct.  I care not one whit about web apps.  I'm interested solely
in single-threaded compute-intensive tasks.  Currently, we run the Torque
batch queuing system on Solaris.  It works fine, though I am constantly
having to scramble to find hardware.  I might have 10 cores available during
the day, 50 at night.  That works well until I'm asked to run 4000 jobs one
day.  Each job can run from a few minutes to several hours.

PiCloud looks interesting except it doesn't seem that your Python functions
can use C or C++ code which is not part of Python proper.  While I write
almost all my software in Python I rely heavily on internal libraries
written in C++ by other groups here at work.

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