Satish Balay <balay@mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> I was thinking more in terms of what amzon would charge for using such
> big images. [presumably charge rate would be higher]

It is just disk space; the EBS limit is 1 TiB:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ComponentsAMIs.html#storage-for-the-root-device

>> I don't understand how it can be that big.  6GB is my entire system
>> including KDE, GNOME, and ton of other huge extraneous packages.
>> Non-debug libpetsc.so is less than 10MB.  Anyway, I think this is the
>> distribution model
>
> The debug builds are huge. [perhaps they can be trimmed down a bit
> with -g insted of '-g3' ]

My build with gcc-4.8.1 -g3 is 45 MB and with clang-3.3 -g3 is 28 MB.
This amount of storage is not the problem.

> Also we discussed defaulting to gcc-4.7+ - so I used fedora-18 which
> has that default. And all the default developer software adds up to
> the basic install.
>
> I attempted a minimal linux with xfce [one of the light weight
> desktops] If we distribute images we need a desktop - but with amazon
> - I guess that could be cut down [and cut down X?] - and bring down
> the disk requirement.

Do people want remote desktop on EC2?  If AMS can provide GUI stuff then
even PETSC_VIEWER_DRAW_ functionality could be put in their web browser,
which I think will ultimately be nicer to interact with anyway (but
makes https critical unless we also ask them to add port forwarding so
that it tunnels over SSH).

> Also amazon images might cut down on swap and other stuff that might
> take up space on a regular VM. [my cleaned up image of 5.4GB might be
> with swap zeroed/compressed out..]

Ultimately, it doesn't matter because it'll all be in EBS and 5GB
vs. 50GB is irrelevant.  It matters for a VM.