Category Archives: Grid

Inaugural Next Net meeting at Betfair

Biological Computing, Distributed Computing, Grid, Jini

We had the inaugural Next Net meeting, held at the Betfair.com offices in Hammersmith, last night. It was well attended event with about 40 people there. Dan Creswell gave an excellent talk on the work he has been doing with Amazons EC2 service (slides are : here).

The aim of the group is to try and get a group of people together who are interested in creating next generation distributed systems – focussing on how you build, manage and develop on large scale, high performance, highly resilient, self healing distributed systems out in the real world not buzzword land.

We are looking at holding the next meeting at Brunel University on January 18th. If you are interested in coming along, or have an idea you want to talk about – then please drop me a mail.

Inaugural Next Net meeting

Distributed Computing, Grid, Jini

A while a go I put the forward the idea about setting up a Jini user group in London. There was pretty good feedback about the idea. Many people felt that it would be better to make the remit of the group slightly wider and focus on future developments in distributed computing. So I am pleased to announce the inaugural meeting of the Next Net user group.

We are going to hold an inaugural meeting at Betfair‘s offices in Hammersmith on Monday December 4th at 6-6.30 pm. If you are interested in future developments in distributed/grid/parallel/large scale/resilient systems then we would love to see you. Please sign up here.

Dan Creswell has agreed to give the first talk on some of the work he has been doing on Amazons EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) infrastructure.

The idea is that it should be a very informal group of like minded individuals. Beer and Pizza included!

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Distributed Computing, Grid

Now this is starting to get interesting! (via Greg)

Amazon have announced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Built along the same economic principles of their S3 storage service it allows you to gain access to a cloud of compute servers that provide you with access to a virtual compute resource that is:

“You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.“

Your “app” consists of a set of one or more “Amazon Machine Images” (AMIs) which are uploaded into their “cloud”. The AMIs can be whatever you want – webservers, app servers, databases, etc with backend file storage provided by S3 – which then run in the cloud.
As with any “grid” style compute service the idea is that you only pay for what you use. The pricing model seems pretty similar to S3s:

  • Pay only for what you use.
  • $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
  • $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

I have only skimmed the site very quickly but this is definitely somehting that needs to be played with!


 Some documentation is here.