You can build Android/Cyanogen or Chrome from scratch -- it easily uses dozens of cores and takes hours on a slow machine. A lot of other build systems won't u

You can build Android/Cyanogen or Chrome from scratch -- it easily uses dozens of cores and takes hours on a slow machine. A lot of other build systems won't use the machine because they don't parallelize. IIRC, the OpenWrt build doesn't parallelize. Another idea: you can also do some big linear algebra problems. I'm doing this now at work and it's kind of interesting that a single cloud machine is like a supercomputer from a decade or so ago (32 cores, 128 GB of RAM). I guess that is obvious but once you start using the whole machine it becomes impressed upon you. I actually bought a big Dell machine to do secure builds... thinking of getting something like this though :)