Table 3.
Cost comparison of Amazon's cloud computing instance types.
| Instance Type | # Instances | Time * (hours) | Cost ($) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Small (single core) | 50 | 1088 | 6256 (0.115 per hour per instance) |
| Standard Large (dual core) | 50 | 544 | 12512 (0.46 per hour per instance) |
| Standard Extra Large (4-cores) | 50 | 272 | 12512 (0.92 per hour per instance) |
| High-CPU Medium (dual core) | 50 | 544 | 6256 (0.23 per hour per instance) |
| High-CPU Extra Large (8 core) | 50 | 136 | 6256 (0.92 per hour per instance) |
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) can be accessed via a number of differet instance types. For the purposes of our comparative genomics problem, we elected to utilize the extra-large high-CPU instance. Note that the total cost for a small instance is equal to the total of the extra large, despite the large difference in computing time.