The NCI (national compute infrastructure) have provided resources into the NeCTAR cloud a few months ago. High Performance Computing in the cloud is looking more and more attractive. It’s still DIY at this point, but the real advantage is not having to do the hardware.
(I do actually miss the hardware, just a little. Crawling around server rooms, cabling with a torch, plugging in monitors and keyboards, the slight industrial deafness you got from all the cooling fans.)
Firing up a Condor cluster was a breeze. I’ll write a how-to in a subsequent post.
Refs:
http://www.nectar.org.au/news/nci-nectar-research-cloud
http://support.rc.nectar.org.au/news/29-04-2014/volumes-now-available-nci-availability-zone