Cost Effective Research Leveraging AWS Spot

Ralph Winzinger

With Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can spin up EC2 compute capacity on demand with no upfront commitments. You can do this even more cost effectively by using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. This allows users to get 90% off on demand prices (often as little as 1c per core hour) and has helped them run very large scale workloads cost effectively. For example, at USC a computational chemist spun up 156,000 core in three days. Also, with the recent release of the Spot fleet API, a researcher or scientist can easily have access to some of the most cost effective compute capacity at a very large scale. Learn how to effectively use these tools for your research needs.