The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.

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Think Sun's Grid computing, only cheaper, with virtualized machine images. I've got an immense project needing lots of CPU power and RAM but it should only last a few weeks if I do it right. This might be the ticket.

Neat.

I like the following line from the guide :

"You can also terminate your instances by logging onto the instances with your ssh tool and running the "shutdown -h" command. Don't forget the "-h", otherwise you will put your instance into single user mode. You will find the latter quite useless."

Indeed, though I wonder how many people there are that are writing applications requiring multi-image distributed computation that don't already know the shutdown -h now command...

Amazon - EC2