This blog will contain updates about the various steps that were taking in completing a research internship about the Amazon EC2 Spotmarket.
The goal is to design and build a system that uses the EC2 Spotmarket to complete certain tasks in a cost efficient manner.
Current status of the project:
1) One of the properties of instances running on the spotmarket is that they are terminated without warning if the current market price exceeds your bid. It is for this reason that there needs to be a fail-safe. In this internship it was requested to use checkpointing. A means of taking snapshots from the current state of execution of a program. The program dmtcp was chosen to fulfill this task.
Currently some tests with this library have been performed and it works as expected.
The next phase will be to further test dmtcp and search for specific problems that are related to cloud computing.
2) A special checkpointing AMI has been created with dmtcp and s3cmd (a program to use S3) installed.
It could be that s3cmd will be replaced by a personal implementation.
3) A java test program to launch instances on the spotmarket was created.
