Ask HN: What would you do with 1,000 free EC2 hours on AWS? 1,000,0000?

Amazon gave me the equivalent of 10,000 free hours on a small EC2 instance when I was working on my last book. I used a few hours of this to prepare a custom AMI with all of the examples in my book set up with Ubuntu and all required infrastructure. I'll be able to keep updated book example AMIs in S3 forever now without it costing me any money out of pocket.

I also used some of this free time to do a 4 day machine learning run on all current English Wikipedia articles.

I will always create an AMI for all of my future books - awesome for readers to be able to have everything all set up. Also, they can clone my AMI, and have a fast start to deploying anything in my book that they want to use for their own projects.

For Amazon, this seems like viral marketing at its best :-)

I think that it was very savvy of Amazon to do this because I ended up writing a lot of material in the book on using Amazon AWS (Elastic MapReduce, S3, etc.). I now spend lots of time experimenting and blogging about AWS, and I ask my customers to host on AWS because I am now so used to using it.

I used to host customer work on VPSs or cheap dedicated servers, but now Amazon is definitely my deployment platform first choice and recommendation. (BTW, I host some of my own stuff on AppEngine because it is even cheaper, but the extra effort of dealing with AppEngine makes it not as attractive for customer projects.)

This is what I would do, but you'd need some prerequisite software and information:

1. Get a genome for the simplest bacteria you can find. 2. You'd need molecular simulation software, specifically DNA and cells

After you've gotten this, I would strip out pieces of the genome using the genetic algorithm (oh the irony) and see if you can slim the genome down to a bare-bones replicating cellular machine.

After that, just a little trial and error and you could be making designer organisms.

(Sorry if you wanted something realistic. My brain doesn't work like that =)

1. Set up a cloud hosting company. 2. ??? 3. Profit!

Seriously, though, probably build a Web indexer/search engine. I seem to keep coming back to the idea every few years and EC2 makes it possible - a million free hours would get me 114 instances for a year, long enough to prove whether any of several new approaches is worthwhile or not.

I don't know what I'd do with 10^3 hours, but with 10^6 hours I'd calculate 5 trillion digits of Pi -- until now this sort of computation has always been done on supercomputers, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be possible to do it on EC2.

I would donate it to the open source community. I mean asking this question here suggest that you got nothing better to do with it, right?

I would work on my dream/future project of creating software that functions like the human brain!

A thousand hours is just above 10 days (assuming you run on a single CPU), so I guess most of us have a spare computer lying about which means that it should be able to handle this data.

As for the 1,000,000 hours? A genetic algorithm that runs through all the publically available data on deals made by the government looking for anything out of the ordinary to flesh out corruption.