Cluster of computers for rent?

Question

I am doing a project in the university which requires running of multiple instances (1000s) of a program I've written (in C++), which runs for quite a while (say 2 hours). The program is very self contained - it does not require input files, and the only dependency I think is boost.

I'm currently using the university-owned cluster of computer. However, it's quite old and the jobs dispatching and monitors services are pretty bad.

So I was wondering whether I can run my jobs elsewhere, for some money. For example, I looked a bit into Google App Engine, but as it seems every job must end after 30 seconds it is not suitable for me. Maybe Amazon EC2?

Do you know of such options?

Answer 1

Amazon EC2 is the classic approach for this.

Google App Engine is great, but probably to restrictive for your use case.

Answer 2

EC2 is definitely a very good option, as Peter says. Since you're at a university I'm guessing that cost may be an important factor, so take a look at Rackspace's cloud service as well; depending on what kind of server resources you need, this can work out quite a bit cheaper than EC2. (I don't work for Rackspace).