This project sought to determine whether Amazon EC2 is an economically viable environment for scientic research-oriented activities within a university setting. The methodology involved benchmarking the performance of the cloud servers against the best systems available at the WPI ECE department. Results indicate that the newest ECE server outperformed the best EC2 instance by approximately 25% in most cases. A comprehensive cost analysis suggests that EC2 instances can achieve up to 60% better cost to performance ratios in the short-term when compared against the ECE servers. However, a long-term projected cost analysis determined that the overall cost of owning a large set of reserved instances comes out to almost 60% more than the cost of comparable in-house servers.

• This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

• Coffey, Patrick J
• Harner, Andrew E
• Mogre, Niyanta
• Beliveau, Jason A

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Identifier

• E-project-030811-115350

Advisor

• Brown, Donald R.

Year

• 2011

Date created

• 2011-03-08

Location

• Worcester

Resource type

• Major Qualifying Project

Major

• Electrical & Computer Engineering

Rights statement

• In Copyright