[StarCluster] Spot Instance Market Price Spikiness: Ideas?

[Damian Eads]

Hi,

Has anyone else noticed spikiness in the price for spot instances
within the past two weeks. I've been finding I'm lucky to get a 5 or
10 node cluster up for more than two days, and in some cases, no more
than an hour. The market price for a c1.xlarge averages about
$0.25/hour but can quickly rise to $0.80 for a short period (<2
hours). Other instance types have also experienced similar spikiness
lately.

Do you know if there is any way to save the state of the cluster when
a system halt signal is given by AWS?

Just curious. Thank you in advance,

Damian

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Damian Eads                           Ph.D. Candidate
University of California             Computer Science
1156 High Street         Machine Learning Lab, E2-489
Santa Cruz, CA 95064    http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~eads

Research Visitor, Machine Intelligence Lab
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge