Colin Harrington

At the end of May (May 29th 2008), Amazon announced that Amazon Web Services Customers can now utilize "High-CPU Instances" on EC2.  According to their specs, there are currently 2 versions of their "High-CPU Instances" as described below:

High-CPU Instances

Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.

High-CPU Medium Instance
1.7 GB of memory
5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
350 GB of instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Price: $0.20 per instance hour

High-CPU Extra Large Instance
7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.80 per instance hour

So the Extra-Large Instance has the computing Power equivalent to 20 EC2 compute units.  This means that CPU bound problems get 2.5 times the performance for the same amount of money.  In a post from earlier this year, I estimated that it would take 3,100,000 CPU hours to crack a 16384 bit RSA key pair based on stats I had found elsewhere.  This came out to be about 38.75 hours (less than a couple days!!) with 10,000 instances and would cost a maximum of $310k (for an insanely large RSA key pair)ie an average of $160k to locate a specific pair.  With the High-CPU instances, it would take approximately 15.5 hours to do the whole computing task from top to bottom.  At 15.5 hours, it would cost $124k or an average of $62k.  This definitely puts some CPU Bound computing jobs in closer reach of those who need it. 

I could only imagine what this would do for CPU bound utilities like Video encoding/transcoding, weather pattern simulators, or large Rendering farms (among many other applications).  I’d love the chance to work with a farm of machines again – Its like having a fleet of robots doing the work in a portion of the time that a traditional desktop could offer.  Photogrammetry, hmmm… Videogrammetry…

Does anyone know of some good Linux based/open Photogrammetry software?