I did not get too excited about Amazon's S3 online storage web services, but the Amazon cloud web services look very compelling: $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed) where an instance is roughly equivalent to 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

I sometimes do large machine learning runs, and the two computers on my local LAN that I usually use (dual CPU Mac tower with 1.5 gigs RAM, Dell dual Pentium with 1 gig of RAM) are fairly fast, but there is often that pesky overnight wait to get a run in.

I need to spend more time checking out Amazon's code samples and documentation, but the idea of spending perhaps $10 and getting a long running machine learning run done quickly is very compelling.

PS. I just tried to sign up for the service, but their beta is full 🙁

PSS. I just got an account 🙂