Computing in the cloud

[s31415]

Found this interesting tutorial about how to use Amazon EC2 to perform computations in the cloud with Ultrafractal 5.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/le36JoO2dgs&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/le36JoO2dgs&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

Sam

[cKleinhuis]

very cool, thank you for the link

[s31415]

So I tried it. It works well fractals such that each pixel takes a very long time to render, typically deep zooms. I doesn't work well at all for fractals whose pixels render fast. For instance, if you want to compute a huge image out of such a fractal, or if you are rendering an animation, the network feature of UF5 is of little use. This is because UF5 sends very small groups of pixels to be computed to the remote computer at a time, so if these are computed quickly, the network delay slows down computations considerably. I wish there was a feature in UF5 allowing to adjust that, because it's only a matter of the size of the pixel packets you send to the remote computer...

For instance, I tried to use a c3.2xlarge computing instance of Amazon EC2, which is supposed to be 10 times faster than my laptop. Using it to render an animation I could only roughly double the computation speed. I found that the optimal number of connections in UF5 is in this case between 9 and 15. Less or more connections effectively increases the computing time.