If anyone is interested, the conclusion of my test to see if I could speed up plot generation by farming it out using cluster/cloud computing is:
Yes it can be done, but it is probably not worth it. This is what I did using Amazon EC2...
First I created a single instance (2 core) to act as the server for the plot storage and also act as the wallet server / miner.
This instance had a 1TB Elastic Block Store volume attached to it (1TB is max EBS volume size on AWS). I made this volume available to the network using NFS
I then created a "plot generator" instance with much higher CPU capacity (C3.xlarge 8 core). I mounted the shared volume so it appeared like a local disk and started creating 10GB plots
I then created a few scripts so that upon startup the instance would auto-mount the NFS volume, figure out what the last used nonce range was, and start mining from the next 10GB plot
Finally, I created an image of this instance and spooled up 100 more instances like it (spot rates, nice and cheap).
To begin with it all looked great but I soon hit the bandwidth limit of the instance I was using as the server. In essence the server didn't have enough network bandwidth to cope with all of the data being copied to it. This restricted plot creation to a little over 100GB / hour. Changing the instance type of the server instance to one with a "high" network performance got this up to around 400 GB/hour. If I had have left it running I would have created all 1 TB of plots in 2.5 hours, at a cost of around $20. This could have been repeated or even parallelized to create several 1TB volumes full of plots in a relatively short amount of time.
After all the fiddling about getting it working, I spent around $70 testing this stuff out, only to conclude it was too much hassle. And as OP said earlier, the cost of EBS storage on AWS is too high to make this a viable long term mining option. That said, had I have done all of this on day one, I would have scaled the process out and had 10TB+ up within the first few hours and dominated the mining. Good to know I have the process licked for the next PoC coin
Unfortunately I STILL don't have any BURST as I don't have any spare capacity at home so haven't been able to mine at all
So if anyone would like to donate some coins to offset the cost of testing all of this, my address is BURST-WADY-CBZE-HSJU-2NH5G
Many thanks!
At $70 per day, that's $2100 per month. You can nearly buy a mobo, a used 6/12 core (12/24 threads) Intel cpu, Ram and some HDD's for that price, give or take....LOL
