Renting Cycles Has Never Been Easier (For Some Definition of 'Easier')

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This video, titled "Building an AWS Cluster in 10 Minutes", is both inspiring and depressing: inspiring, because you really can set up a cheap supercomputer for almost no money in just a few minutes, and depressing, because it's effectively out of reach for most scientists, who won't understand the terms being thrown around (certainly not well enough to get themselves out of trouble if anything goes wrong). The good news is, Titus Brown's course has shown that scientists can get from zero to cluster in just two (full-time) weeks.