[TriLUG] [Novalug] Comparing Clouds; A trivial test. (fwd)

[Maxwell Spangler]

Sorry!

While I did actually setup an instance on Google Compute Engine, I
didn't remember to run my little test on it.  Then, due to the cost of
GCE, I shut my instance down pretty fast.  Porting was my objective, not
benching.

The code for my simple little C program is here:

https://github.com/maxwax/cpu-looper

As you can see, there really isn't much to it and its more comments than
actual code which is just *eight* lines.  The only point of this program
is to generate constant user space CPU activity and it does that
perfectly.  I dressed up the code with comments so others (including
novices) can experiment with it.

But the real point of this truly exploratory experiment was just to see
if cloud providers are heavily over committing resources and how
multi-tenancy would impact a user who simply wants to run long
CPU-focused jobs.  Measuring storage, network, etc, is too complicated
for me right now but definitely an area I expect to be working in more.

I liked GCE while just using it for a few hours.  It was nice to see KVM
being used instead of Xen, performance was snappy, and there are some
clever things like gcutil being used on the client.  I'd like to work
with it more, but it's too expensive for pet projects right now :(.

Cheers,


-- 
Maxwell Spangler
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