For me, the biggest thing about AWS has been easy access to * ridiculously* powerful machines for not very much money -- a few of us decided that we wanted to b

For me, the biggest thing about AWS has been easy access to * ridiculously* powerful machines for not very much money -- a few of us decided that we wanted to build a markov chain from the entirety of Wikipedia, which is quite doable if you have access to a box with 68GB of RAM. That's quite a bit more than a standard student laptop. I think on the last run we got about 2/3 of the way through; we should be able to do the whole thing if i ever get round to running it again.