Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting computations?

Re:Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting com... by katharas on Monday August 03, 2015 @01:51PM (#9998243)

I am doing my thesis (in the general area of video classification) as an electrical engineer in a Greek University and I am currently running some experiments that try to learn a video representation from local features (kernel codebook encoding) using an SVM variant and stochastic gradient descent.

I could use a couple of c4.8xlarge instances to run the experiments trying out learning parameters. I am currently "competing" for time in the lab's cluster so I end up running the experiments in whatever computer I find available.

Anyway, thanks for the opportunity, it is really generous of you.

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Re:Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting com... by plicense on Monday August 03, 2015 @02:11PM (#9998429)

You know it pains me to see you ask for resources. Everyday at work, my team uses a couple r3.4x large and c4.8x large for trivial tasks. My team does not realize how valuable a resource they are accessing(and wasting) everyday. I wish I can donate those to you, but company policy forbids me to.

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Re:Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting com... by katharas on Monday August 03, 2015 @02:19PM (#9998492)

Thanks for the thought!

I hope I didn't sound ungrateful... There are resources in the university but they come with overhead and not as much freedom as a VM on which you can do anything.

That said our cluster is about as big as two c4.8xlarge vms.

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Re:Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting com... by cheald on Monday August 03, 2015 @02:29PM (#9998589)

FWIW, you can have 2 cc2.8xlarge spot instances for about $0.50/hour. $12/day isn't nothing, but it's pretty affordable. Stick your data on an EBS instance attached to the spot so you keep your data if the spot instance gets nuked and you have a functioning cluster for around 13% of the on-demand price.

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Re:Ask HN: $8k on AWS in August for you, any interesting com... by mryan on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @03:42AM (#10002127)

Your thesis sounds interesting. I'm working with a company doing some research in a potentially similar area. They might be able to spare some time on their cluster - drop me an email if interested and I'll see if I can set something up.

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