Running JavaSE cruncher kernel in the cloud
I have been building stochastic simulations in Java for a long time. They work great, but the company's hardware is unreliable, old, and unlikely to be replaced soon.
The modeling and number crunching is written entirely in J2SE. Some of these require little GUI interaction or window display to render images that are then saved to disk. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to run Matlab or R code on a faster and more remote pay-as-you-go machine.
My question is, is it easy or just to run my J2SE simulations by buying time in the cloud somewhere?
This should be safe as some data has NDA issues.
I'm new to the cloud and EC2 sounds a little more complicated at the moment, plus I'm not sure if I can use a GUI. In a previous job, I would just open the company's virtual machine in a web browser (XP works), copy my files, and run the code on a much faster VM. What I am really worried about, although in this case the cars were the property of the company.
source to share
The need to expand the GUI will limit your options a little. EC2 is not as bad as it sounds when you add third-party tools like RightScale to it . But once you've got EC2 up and running, you need to install Linux with Xvfb and see if your image suits your needs (Xvfb isn't always, but it looks like your needs are pretty simple). Or you can go from Windows to EC2.
There are a ton of Linux VPS services out there that do Java, and might even do Xvfb, which would be a cheaper option.
Speaking of which, the biggest problem I see is the NDA issue. There is no good path in a third party cloud. You most likely agree with reasonable standard NDAs, but something with serious privacy is very problematic in cloud computing today (unless, of course, you run your own cloud on the hardware you control).
source to share