Renting CPU time

[jshriver]

I've contacted a couple super computing centers and no one seems to be able to help.

A 16 core or CPU machine is a bit out of budget for most people, yet too small for a computing center to rent out cpu time.

Anyone here know of any places that will rent cpu time for such a machine (Unix, specifically Linux based preferred).

Thanks in advance,
-Josh

[CThinker]

Elastic Compute from Amazon:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

[jdart]

EC2 is a reasonable solution, but it depends on what you need.

In my fairly recent experience a "High CPU" instance from Amazon with 8 virtual cores was a little slower than a dedicated physical machine with 4 cores. Good but not spectacular. If you can scale across a cluster of these, you can get a lot of compute power, but not otherwise.

[jdart]

Most hosting providers can get you an 8-core. 16-core is a little harder but this place claims to have one:

http://www.liquidweb.com/cart/content/dedicated/

(Caveat: I haven't done business with them; have no idea if they are reputable).

Not cheap and in fact quite pricey for their highest-end machines. But cheaper than buying.