Cloud server?

[fishfishfish]

I'm building a data mining app at work which looks for associations between stuff stored in a MySQL database. It's a tad on the intensive side and can max out all four cores on my i7 quad core machine for about 2-3 days.

At the moment it's running inside our LAN, but we need to access the data from our web servers so I am wondering whether it might be a good idea to stick it on a cloud server. Maybe one of those EC2 things.

Does anyone have any experience of this? Does this seem a good idea? The main reason for thinking EC2 might be a wise move is that we may sell access to the data mining tool so third parties can utilise it, and we'll need something scalable for that.

 

[fishfishfish]

Thanks. Sounds ideal, then. Yes, the calculations only need to run once a week. I'm currently optimising the code to reduce the number of queries required and try to improve performance. Amazing how much processing power it can use up.

 

[fishfishfish]

Thanks for the useful feedback everyone.

@blueacid: Bandwidth usage should be fairly low. We'll just be pulling in recent purchase data and then accessing some of it via a webservice. Shouldn't be too bad.

@bigredshark: Yes, I'm working on optimising it! The performance/speed issue is really just down to the volume of queries being made, I think. It's using an apriori type algorithm, which has a tendency to bit a tad intensive - might change this to something quicker. I'm adding more tree-pruning steps to it to cut down on the number of queries, speeding things up a bit.

Security wise, it really only contains customer IDs and binary scores, plus product names and prices. Nothing really personally identifiable, or valuable to anyone else. Anything remotely personal tends to be encrypted.