Second Annual EC2 Spotathon – Win up to $5,000 in EC2 Credit

We ran the first EC2 Spotathon last year, and announced the results at the first re:Invent conference. We invited participants to use EC2 Spot Instances to save time and money, and to make their businesses more interesting and efficient. We awarded the Grand Prize to PiCloud and the Runner-Up Prize to Princeton Consultants, with honorable mentions going to Numerate and the Lawrence Berkeley Labs Turbine Science Gateway.

Time for Round 2
I would like to invite you to apply to the Second Annual EC2 Spotathon!

This is an open-ended coding challenge where you can demonstrate how you use Spot Instances to accelerate your applications or to reduce your compute costs. As a participant in this year’s Spotathon, you could win the Grand Prize of $5,000 in AWS Credit or the Runner-Up Prize of $3,000 in AWS Credit. Note that $5,000 is enough for you to run 40 core-years of computation in than a day on Spot Instances, as the folks at Cycle Computing did earlier this year.

The best submissions will be invited to present at a poster session at AWS re:Invent, where we will also announce the Grand Prize and Runner-Up winners.

Apply Soon
To apply, simply use the Spotathon Submission Form to tell us how you have used Spot Instances. Be sure to mail the form to ec2-spotathon@amazon.com by Thursday, October 31. Visit the Spotathon page to learn more and to see the Official Rules.

— Jeff;