Category: Compute

I will be in China and India starting next week. Apart from other meetings and presentations to user group, this time, I will be taking up 3-hour workshops. These workshops are targeted at architects and technical decision makers and attendees will get a chance to play with core AWS infrastructure services. If you are a […]

Despite the fact that I have written over 800 posts for this blog, I never know what to expect in terms of traffic or attention from any given post. Last Friday afternoon I spent an hour or two putting together a relatively quick post to remind everyone that it is possible to use Amazon SimpleDB […]

We’ve removed the distinction between Amazon EC2 running Windows and Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services, allowing all of our Windows instances to make use of Authentication Services such as LDAP, RADIUS, and Kerberos. With this change, any Windows instance can host a Domain Controller or join an existing domain. File sharing services such […]

I think it is really interesting to see how breakthroughs and process improvements in one scientific or technical discipline can drive that discipline forward while also enabling progress in other seemingly unrelated disciplines. The Bioinformatics field is rife with examples of this pattern. Declining hardware costs, cloud computing, the ability to do parallel processing, and […]

Weighing in at a whopping 500 GB (388 GB of data and 112 GB of free space to allow for some in-place decompression), the Wikipedia XML data is our newest Public Data Set. This data set contains all of the Wikimedia wikis in the form of wikitext source and metadata embedded in XML. We’ll be […]

The folks at Infochimps have just released the Daily Global Weather Public Data Set. This 20 GB data set incorporates daily weather measurements (temperature, dew point, wind speed, humidity, barometric pressure, and so forth) from over 9000 weather stations around the world. The data was originally collected as part of the Global Surface Summary of […]

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS, is now available as a Public Data Set. Weighing in at 180 GB, the SDSS is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. The researchers have used a 2.5 meter, 120 megapixel telescope located in Apache Point, New Mexico to capture images of over one quarter of the […]

Today we are adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store  (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot to yourself (the default), share it with a list […]