Matthew Knepley <knepley@gmail.com> writes:

> I have a buddy with a company that does this. Once they are more
> established, I think it might be a good collaboration. EC2 time is
> still expensive enough that the only people that use it are willing to
> pay for software and support.

If you are fine with batch processing, you can use the Spot pricing,
which gets you a 2-socket E5-2670 compute node with 10 GbE and 60 GB of
memory for $0.27/hour.  It takes 100 nodes just to equal the hourly wage
of a grad student.  Is that not a decent price?

(The unreserved on-demand rate is about 4x higher, and there are
reserved instances of intermediate cost, plus an annual fee.)