back to article Mind waiting for compute jobs? Boy, does the cloud have a price for you!

It's an open secret that the virtual machines people buy from public clouds have variable performance properties, but it's about to get a whole lot worse as providers prepare to sell people gear with sludgier capabilities than ever before, but at a low, low price. Now, researchers have figured out a way cloud providers can …

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  1. Montreal Sean

    cheap cloud servers

    I just picked up a cloud server for $35 CAD, one-time fee for a lifetime access.

    Specs are low though, one Xeon CPU @2.7GHz, 512MB RAM, 10GB fibre-channel disk, 100Mbps connection with 500GB transfer/month.

    Not sure what I'm going to do with it though.

    http:// cloud at cost . ca/

  2. dan1980

    Just unpredictable

    Repeat after Dan: "Omega is not nondeterministic" . . .

    Let's break this habit/tradition of calling programs with unpredictable output "nondeterministic". Any given decision this scheduling system makes will be deterministic and so the entire system is deterministic. It makes so many deterministic decisions, however, that the end result, while still deterministic, will be unpredictable for all practical purposes.

    1. dan1980

      Re: Just unpredictable

      Of course, you could make the system non-deterministic through a random number generator, though you would have to seed that with a non-deterministic input, meaning you'd probably want to base it off some user input*, which might not always be available given the constant, automated nature of many of the background jobs.

      In short, you'd have to actually work to make it non-deterministic.

      * - And there you get into philosophical territory, questioning if human action is truly nondeterministic; do we really have free will?

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