Running a JavaSE number cruncher in a cloud

Question

I've spent a long time building stochastic simulations in Java. They work great, but the company hardware is unreliable, getting old and unlikely to be replaced soon.

The simulations and number crunching are entirely written in J2SE. Some of them need a little GUI interaction, or to display a window in order to render images which are then saved to disk. Sometimes it would also be nice to be able to run Matlab or R code on a faster, remote, pay-as-you-use machine basis.

My question: is it simple/possible to just run my J2SE simulations by buying time in a cloud somewhere?

It would need to be secure, since some data has NDA issues.

I am a cloud novice, and EC2 sounds a bit daunting at the moment, plus I'm not sure I could use a GUI on it. In a previous job, I would just open up a company VM in a web browser (running XP), copy my files, and then run the code on the much faster blade VM. That's the kind of ease I'm after really, although in that case the machines were the company's own.

Answer 1

The need to spin up a GUI is going to limit your options somewhat. EC2 isn't as bad as it looks when you add some third party tools to it, such as RightScale. But once you got EC2 going, you have to install Linux with Xvfb and see if the imaging meets your needs (Xvfb doesn't always, but it sounds like your needs are fairly simple). Or you could go with Windows on EC2.

There are a ton of Linux VPS services out there that do Java, and may even do Xvfb, that would be a cheaper option.

That being said, the biggest problem I see is the NDA issue. There is no good way around that on a third party cloud. You would be in compliance with reasonable standard NDAs, most likely, but something with serious confidentiality is very much a problem in cloud computing today (unless, of course, you run your own cloud on hardware you control).