Working Notes

Brewing a bourbon barrel porter, which doesn't actually require a barrel of any kind. The recipe does call for 16 oz of the whiskey of my choice, soaked in oak cube and added after secondary fermentation, so that'll be a plus.  Beer will be ready for drinking in early February. 

[ This is part 3 of the series. Check-out the Introduction and AWS .] Google's Cloud Computing platform was unknown to me when I started this experiment. I knew it was there, and I knew people used it. Just not as many as Amazon or Azure. However, if an organization could rival Amazon's technology footprint, it would have to be the massive efforts of the ubiquitous search and email giant. Unlike AWS, Google's computing platform offers a $300 credit for the first year of service and Always Free service model; you can read more about GCP Free Tier . With a free $300 in burning a hole in my pocket, I build a machine using the 'n1-standard-1' template and placed it in the US-Central(Iowa) region. The n1-standard is a 1vCPU machine with 3.75GB of RAM, running Debian Linux. With the exception of the region, all of these configurations are similar to the t2.micro instances built in AWS. NOTE: There are shared core f1-micro and g1-small instances that I could have bu...

In part one , we introduced the use case of a CPU intense workload and baseline data from my MacMini. Since I last checked, Amazon Web Services hosts roughly 70% of all cloud computing resources. For all practical purposes, it IS the cloud; Microsoft, Oracle, and Google all struggling to catch-up. Since my cloud experience is mostly Amazon-related, I decided to start there.  I created three, free-tier EC2 (t2.micro) instances running Amazon Linux. At the time, free-tier provides only 1 vCPU, 1GB of memory and 8GB of storage, with more available if you want to mount your S3 bucket or add EBS storage. Right away, my MacMini has an advantage, since it's a 2 processor machine, and Amazon only gives me one.  But what does the free-tier get you in terms of CPU performance? The answer is not much.  The CPUs are Intel Xeon processors, running at 2.40gHz. Interesting, the SETI benchmark for Integer and Floating-Point operations fell well below what M...

Introduction I didn't start out with the idea of analyzing different cloud services, but then that's what happens when tinkering becomes interesting.  Since its release in 1997, I've been a fan of the movie Contact . It was my first introduction to SETI and radio telescopes. Around the same time, computing started to become a thing. When I heard about distributed.net and the  SETI@Home project, I immediately latched on....because I'm a nerd.  Initially, SETI@Home was released as a stand-alone client. More recently, it was rebuilt as a project under the BOINC program at the University of California Berkeley. As part of this program, you can donate CPU cycles to any number of (non-cryptocurrency) projects. The Clean Energy Project, The SkyNet, and Einstein@Home are all other projects available the BOINC program.  To participate, the BOINC client is installed on the target system and registered. Based on the user's preferences, data blocks one or more o...