Not to threadjack, but: what's a good alternative for the occasional high-ram, high-CPU-usage compute-intensive task? Say I wanted a machine to run some MCMC simulations, and needed 32GB RAM and a fast i7-class CPU. Where would I find one?
Depends on the value of "occasional", but did you try asking your friends?
I've seen that being done around here, since the hardware you're describing really is pretty close to a beefy desktop/home server which usually spend their lives idly spinning their fans.
For an instance you run only rarely the somewhat higher cost of EC2 instances compared to other providers should be fairly irrelevant. You'll find options from about 30 to 80 cents an hour.
Just to put in endorsement: I've used OVH for years, and I love their service. Just this past week while upgrading a server I accidentally screwed up my GRUB configuration and couldn't boot back up.
However, they noticed the downtime problem and emailed me saying that a technician had been dispatched to look at the problem. Within 15 minutes, they fixed my GRUB configuration and had my server back up. And, they didn't charge me any for the work the technician did.
It was awesome, and they immediately won my long-time business!
Rackspace recently rolled out 'cloud' dedicated servers that are designed for this use case. You just pay for the time that you have the server, so for workloads like you described I think it's worth checking out. See here for more info:
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/
