I have read some articles about Amazon's Web Services and am interested in:
- Knowing exactly what I am getting (maybe some equivalent terms to a physical machine would be helpful)
- The "performance" compared to I guess my own machine or other widely available options.
That being said, I have an intel i7 processor with 8 cores, 2GB of RAM per core. I also do not know much about hardware, distributed computing and parallel computation.
I will be working with large datasets and applying algorithms to these large datasets. Anyway, here are the two articles I read which address these questions: Article1 and Article2.
I do not really know all the terms in the articles but it seems that the best I can get is not much better than my own machine. The simplest test I did (which greatly disappointed me) was to start an instance on EC2, run python and create a large barabasi graph via networkx (a graph library). I forget the actual size but my machine completed the task in about a minute, while EC2 had to shut the process down. So much for high performance computing...
It is also likely that I am missing the big idea in my usage or thoughts about Amazon EC2. Please let me know and thanks in advance!
EDIT: To clarify I am interested in computing power. Will I be able to process my large datasets more effectively (in less time)?