SIMION on Amazon EC2

The Amazon EC2 service provides low-cost pay-by-the-hour remote access to computing systems. Some of these systems provide large amounts of RAM. For example, “High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large” instances have 68.4 GB RAM and 8 CPU cores, can run Windows 2008 R2 or Linux, and cost $2.48 per hour as of this writing (October 2011), or a fraction of this price for systems with less RAM. This can be much more cost effective for occasional large SIMION jobs compared to buying a new system with thousands of dollars in extra RAM that you might rarely use. This service may also be useful for testing your typical SIMION workloads on various systems prior to purchasing a new system. See also Amazon EC2 instance types and pricing for details on options and Wikipedia: Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud for more background.

Although any version of SIMION may be used on EC2, you can make the most of EC2 using SIMION® 8.1, which has 64-bit CPU support (providing access to more than 2 GB RAM) and Multicore CPU support (for faster speed). Please note that SIMION 8.1.0.30 or above is required for array files exceeding 16 GB.

Amazon EC2 instances can be accessed remotely via the Windows Remote Desktop utility (“mstsc”) built into Windows or via rdesktop or similar utilities on Linux or Mac. You can control the remote desktop with your mouse and keyboard just like any other Windows-based computer.

You can transfer files between the remote computer and yours via copy/paste or by forwarding local drive resources to the remote computer via Remote Desktop connection settings.

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Fig. 69 Example of a huge 56 GB PA running in an EC2 instance.

Note

This page is abridged from the full SIMION "Supplemental Documentation" (Help file). The following additional sections can be found in the full version of this page accessible via the "Help > Supplemental Documentation" menu in SIMION 8.1.1 or above:

  • Usage Notes