Posts by D/C

HPC and grid apps

It's a perfect fit for HPC and grid based applications. Grid middleware is designed to handle re-execution of failed jobs, checkpointing jobs in case of failure and so on. The loss of a system because the spot price is too high should just mean the job can be queued and restarted later when the price is more acceptable.

In one of the announcements, it was mentioned that clean shutdowns of systems will always be attempted (though as always, not a given), so you would even be able to checkpoint the job's state during shutdown.

For most applications, this probably isn't useful and the normal on-demand service will continue to be what's used, but for some workloads, it makes a lot of sense.