Compute Cluster: DSC00179 © Jordan Thevenow-Harrison / CC I few months ago I was trying to track down information about Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, pay-as-you-go virtual clustering service. At the time Declan Butler had emailed me asking about the feasibility of running bioinformatics applications on EC2. My investigation of EC2 for bioinformatics applications turned up very little at the time, today however Andrew Perry has posted an analysis on the feasibility of EC2 for running mpiBLAST. If you're into bioinformatics clusters (of course) then go read it right away, if you've considered a cluster and balked at the expense then this may be a solution.
The down side is, Amazon's limited-beta for EC2 is now full. Hey Amazon, Bioinformatics is a growing market, might pay to help Andrew out with some account space ?
